Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “But I can’t do anything for him and he can’t do anything for me. We must wail in our own corners.”

— Iris Murdoch

352. “This figure, which I had so vaguely, idly, noticed before was now utterly changed in my eyes. The whole world was its background. And between me and it there hovered, perhaps for the last time, the vision of a slim long-legged girl with gleaming thighs. I ran.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

354. “There are moments when, if one rejects the simple and obvious promptings of duty, one finds oneself in a labyrinth of complexities of some quite new kind.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

357. “In a world without a redeemer only clarity was the answer to guilt. He would make it all clear to himself, shirking nothing, and then he would decide.”

— Iris Murdoch

358. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

360. “I’m not interested. I never liked him. He’s some sort scoundrel.”

— Iris Murdoch

361. “I tried deep breathing, but seemed to lose contact with myself between each breath, so that the next one was always an emergency. I began to feel faint.”

— Iris Murdoch

362. “I felt so ashamed with them because everything in their life was going so well and they were so sort of successful. I couldn’t talk about what I wanted with them and they were always in a hurry.”

— Iris Murdoch

363. “It is sometimes said, either irritably or with a certain satisfaction, that philosophy makes no progress. It is certainly true, and I think this is an abiding and not a regrettable characteristic of the discipline, that philosophy has in a sense to keep trying to return to the beginning: a thing which it is not at all easy to do.”

— Iris Murdoch

364. “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

365. “You’re doing your thing, why can’t I do my thing? I must be me even if I suffer for it.”

— Iris Murdoch

366. “Disapproving of things is all right. But you mustn’t disapprove of people. It cuts you off.”

— Iris Murdoch

367. “I think women, perhaps unconsciously, convey to female children a deep sense of their own discontent.”

— Iris Murdoch

368. “Odd I should have said those words before and forgotten them. It makes one feel that human beings are just machines after all.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

370. “Since she had been looking after him she had felt bound to him by a strange silent love.”

— Iris Murdoch

371. “How absolute the knave is!”

— Iris Murdoch

372. “Desperate for help, living his life now as a hideous dream, he had told nobody.”

— Iris Murdoch

373. “I must proceed to my next mystery and for the moment forget this one completely.”

— Iris Murdoch

374. “Of course we have an ‘unconscious mind’ and this is partly what my book is about. But there is no general chart of that lost continent. Certainly not a ‘scientific’ one.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

376. “Yet on the other hand, I did manage to write, and without more than occasional repining, during my years of bondage, and I would not, as some unsatisfied writers do, blame my lack of productivity upon my lack of time.”

— Iris Murdoch

377. “I can’t tell you – oh I can’t tell you – how awful – how sort of unlivable – everything is now – like a great black wall in front of me – Something’s got to smash.”

— Iris Murdoch

378. “It’s much better that I should read the letter. Otherwise I shall be endlessly wondering what was in it.”

— Iris Murdoch

379. “Mercifully one forgets one’s love affairs as one forgets one’s dreams.”

— Iris Murdoch

380. “He could feel the pain of her heart beating strongly against his own.”

— Iris Murdoch

381. “The most interesting things are always happening behind one.”

— Iris Murdoch

382. “Of course this chattering diary is a facade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure. Yet such pretenses are not only consolations but may even be productive of a little ersatz courage.”

— Iris Murdoch

383. “She was her death now, that death which she had so much striven to emulate in life, which she had studied and practised and loved. She had succeeded, and death and she had converged into a single point. Who knew if that was victory or defeat? His last vision was of the white veil that hid her now. After all, and at last, she had become utterly private.”

— Iris Murdoch

384. “If I see her she may kill hope.”

— Iris Murdoch

385. “There was a shadowy light, not exactly twilight, but an uncertain vivid yet hazy illumination, wherein people walked like spirits, bathed in light and not revealed.”

— Iris Murdoch

386. “The morning brought the crisis of my life. But it was not anything that I could have conceived of in my wildest imaginings.”

— Iris Murdoch

387. “It might be most dramatically effective to begin the tale at the moment when Arnold Baffin rang me up and said, “Bradley, could you come round here please, I think I have just killed my wife.”

— Iris Murdoch

388. “Better keep such things decently buried.”

— Iris Murdoch

389. “He felt himself falling into a state, very common when he was younger, of being totally cut off from the society he was in.”

— Iris Murdoch

390. “I can see this so clearly because I have long ago given up my own hopes of being happy.”

— Iris Murdoch

391. “I’ve never had any luck, Brad. I don’t even hope for any any more.”

— Iris Murdoch

392. “But thinking about wickedness usually just comforts.”

— Iris Murdoch

393. “Anyway people never fall in love suddenly like that except in novels.”

— Iris Murdoch

394. “Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.”

— Iris Murdoch

395. “All the effort which he had put into making himself seemed vanity now that there were no more purposes.”

— Iris Murdoch

396. “My personal peculiarities could not offend her since she was totally uninterested in my pretensions to be a person.”

— Iris Murdoch

397. “We were eternally divided. And it somehow seemed strange to me that this had not happened earlier, so dangerous were we to each other.”

— Iris Murdoch

398. “I could not see other human beings at present.”

— Iris Murdoch

399. “To overthrow a tyrant, whether in public or in private, one must learn to hate.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch