Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “The agony was of suddenly feeling herself so separate and so secret.”

— Iris Murdoch

352. “Patchway had the enviable countryman’s capacity, which is shared only by great actors, of standing by and saying nothing, and yet existing, large, present, and at ease.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

355. “Every artist is an unhappy lover.”

— Iris Murdoch

356. “I said, “Your brother is in bed with my wife.” I added, “I just took them up some wine in bed.”

— Iris Murdoch

357. “This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart...”

— Iris Murdoch

358. “However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

361. “Well, we all three loved and comforted each other. We were poorish and lonely and awkward together.”

— Iris Murdoch

362. “You talk of freedom – I’ve never had it! I’ve been lonely and miserable and in despair, and you want me to consent to all that all over again!”

— Iris Murdoch

363. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

365. “I adore your jealousy, especially when it’s so misplaced. I expect Shakespeare wrote a sonnet about that.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

367. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

370. “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

371. “How can we not be dooms to each other?”

— Iris Murdoch

372. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

384. “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

385. “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

386. “How absolute the knave is!”

— Iris Murdoch

387. “It was her birthday. She thought, I am always unhappy on this day.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

395. “You’re such an agonizer, Bradley. You romanticize art. You’re a masochist about it, you want to suffer, you want to feel that your inability to create is continuously significant.”

— Iris Murdoch

396. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

398. “I need daylight. But I wander in the dark.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch