Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Eccentrics with unseeing eyes glided through, savouring amid so much society their own particular loneliness and private sins and sorrows.”

— Iris Murdoch

302. “The agony was of suddenly feeling herself so separate and so secret.”

— Iris Murdoch

303. “He felt as if something had been completed and he would never see any of those people again.”

— Iris Murdoch

304. “What greater torment than to see that light, and then to see it eternally withdrawn?”

— Iris Murdoch

305. “He was glad that he had expressed to her, however blunderingly, what he felt. He was glad that he had held her hand.”

— Iris Murdoch

306. “This is an age of demons and amoral angels and all sorts of deep fears, like the first centuries of the Christian era, it’s an age of extreme solutions.”

— Iris Murdoch

307. “He did not touch her but enjoyed the particular intimate pain of the tension between them.”

— Iris Murdoch

308. “Ludens experienced, as an extra pain, an intimation of the happiness he might have felt in such a place.”

— Iris Murdoch

309. “The whole extraordinary business was over. And I was back where I belonged, where my childhood had condemned me to be, alone, out in the cold without a coat.”

— Iris Murdoch

310. “You don’t know what it’s like to be me, you don’t know what it’s like to be all tattered and destroyed inside.”

— Iris Murdoch

311. “You’re as wonderful as I expected, and I worship you for it.”

— Iris Murdoch

312. “As it is I crawl on everyday towards the tomb. When I wake in the morning I think first of death, do you?”

— Iris Murdoch

313. “Happiness. What’s that? I don’t know. How can one be happy when one loves a demon?”

— Iris Murdoch

314. “I don’t like you, I love you. You’re a portent for me, a sign. I’ve always lived by signs.”

— Iris Murdoch

315. “It’s so sad, all our house seems broken apart, everyone is going.”

— Iris Murdoch

316. “She was not just a wild creature, she was a wounded creature.”

— Iris Murdoch

317. “It is strange to think that when I went to the sea I imagined that I was giving up the world. But one surrenders power in one form, and grasps it in another.”

— Iris Murdoch

318. “His heart ached in such a familiar way, and the very familiarity of it pained him.”

— Iris Murdoch

319. “He felt sad, sad.”

— Iris Murdoch

320. “I just hope – if he does come – it won’t be some sort of horror show.”

— Iris Murdoch

321. “Living with someone who hates you is – it drives you mad –.”

— Iris Murdoch

322. “An experience is richest not talked of.”

— Iris Murdoch

323. “Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness.”

— Iris Murdoch

324. “I wonder if it’s harder to be good in this age?”

— Iris Murdoch

325. “It’s all a dream, he thought, one goes through life in a dream, it’s all too hard.”

— Iris Murdoch

326. “Let me sleep at last. I’ve had misery enough in my life. You said there was nowhere to go to. There is death to go to. I’ve had misery enough in my life.”

— Iris Murdoch

327. “Nothing is more maddening than being questioned by the object of one’s interest about the object of hers, should that object not be you.”

— Iris Murdoch

328. “Every persisting marriage is based on fear’, said Peregrine. ‘Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what’s at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower...”

— Iris Murdoch

329. “I am not famous for anything in particular. I am just famous.”

— Iris Murdoch

330. “How could it be that I had actually kissed her cheek without enveloping her, without becoming her? How could I at that moment have refrained from kneeling at her feet and howling?”

— Iris Murdoch

331. “It had indeed been a failure of faith and courage not to wander on through the forest, not to search faithfully for his true mate, not to believe and endure.”

— Iris Murdoch

332. “And she wondered now how she could go on existing through the successive moments of her life.”

— Iris Murdoch

333. “I saw her simplicity, her ignorance, her childish unkindness, her unpretty anxious little face. She was not beautiful or brilliantly clever. How false it is to say that love is blind. I could even judge her, I could even condemn her, I could even, in some possible galactic loop of thought, make her suffer.”

— Iris Murdoch

334. “Real worship involves waiting.”

— Iris Murdoch

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335. “Only stories and magic really endure.”

— Iris Murdoch

336. “I have seen much of human beings over a long period, and I have learnt how little good to expect from them.”

— Iris Murdoch

337. “He simply would not have married anybody whom he loved in that rather simple mediocre sort of way.”

— Iris Murdoch

338. “Give yourself to these great works of art. They suffice for a lifetime.”

— Iris Murdoch

339. “She tells so many different stories and they are all false.”

— Iris Murdoch

340. “I’m afraid you’re all mixed up in my mind,’ I said. ‘I wonder where they are now –’ ‘Married.’ She spoke it as if it were the name of a distant country.”

— Iris Murdoch

341. “But I’ve got a kind of misery that makes me blind and deaf. You wouldn’t understand. You live in the open with all of you spread out around you. I’m mangled in a machine. Even to say it’s my own fault doesn’t mean anything.”

— Iris Murdoch

342. “Only the house was still desolate and the day had a livid ruined atmosphere, time had been damaged in some deep way, like on a day of bereavement or frightful national disaster.”

— Iris Murdoch

343. “Your infatuation will end in tears.”

— Iris Murdoch

344. “A less courageous person would have felt that it was too late, they would have felt ashamed, they would think wellI don’t want this, I know I shall hate it, it’s all wrong, but I’m so involved now I’ll have to put up with it, and I know that later on I’ll keep on wishing that I’d had the nerve to say no, even at the last minute...”

— Iris Murdoch

345. “The room had the rather sinister tedium which some bedrooms have, a sort of weary banality which is a reminder of death. A dressing table can be a terrible thing.”

— Iris Murdoch

346. “She was a part, an evidence, of some pure uncracked unfissured confidence in the good which was never there for me again.”

— Iris Murdoch

347. “But one must do something about the past. It doesn’t just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing.”

— Iris Murdoch

348. “He was attentive but impersonal, and esteemed rather than loved.”

— Iris Murdoch

349. “One knows what being in love is like and it is a very terrible thing.”

— Iris Murdoch

350. “You get so worked up and flowery! You sound as if you were quoting something all the time!”

— Iris Murdoch