Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 9 of 10

401. “So was she on the side of dragons and indifferent to the fate of princesses?”

— Iris Murdoch

402. “And she did seem then to go to sleep instantly: the quick flight into oblivion of the chronically unhappy person.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

405. “But people have their own troubles and tend to forget. One is not all that interesting. Even Hitler is being forgotten at last.”

— Iris Murdoch

406. “He felt, in a way so familiar as to be almost dreary, the chosen victim of the gods, the self-admitted traitor, the one destined for judgment.”

— Iris Murdoch

407. “He’s had a bloody awful childhood. Like I had. Those things get passed on and on.”

— Iris Murdoch

408. “Or did I know by intuition that wonderful and terrible things were really imminent at last, trembling into being just behind the curtain of the future?”

— Iris Murdoch

409. “He suffers terribly all the time. He lives in fire.”

— Iris Murdoch

410. “He was not notably vertebrate and could hardly look after himself, so how could he look after Crystal?”

— Iris Murdoch

411. “For a while everything became too terrible, one could scarcely bear to be conscious.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

413. “There was as much emotion generated between them now as if they had been lovers.”

— Iris Murdoch

414. “Somehow I’ve always wanted the ones that didn’t want me. I’m the absolute queen bee of unrequited love.”

— Iris Murdoch

415. “There is no triumph of good, and if there were it would not be a triumph of good.”

— Iris Murdoch

416. “She must not be tempted by truthfulness, she must play the game out to the end.”

— Iris Murdoch

417. “She thought, I shall die of misery and pain.”

— Iris Murdoch

418. “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

419. “That art gives charm to terrible things is perhaps its glory, perhaps its curse. Art is a doom.”

— Iris Murdoch

420. “He can do anything he likes and I’m so lonely, oh so lonely – And I put up with it because there was nothing else to do –.”

— Iris Murdoch

421. “Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child’s despair.”

— Iris Murdoch

422. “Girls don’t want men to be quiet and gentle, I’m told. If you’re not panting with impatient lust they think you’re not interested.”

— Iris Murdoch

423. “Coming events do cast shadows.”

— Iris Murdoch

424. “I was not, except in some very broken-down sense of that ambiguous term, a love child. I was a word child.”

— Iris Murdoch

425. “Please excuse this outpouring which perhaps makes no sense but is the utter darkness of my spirit pouring from me like black blood.”

— Iris Murdoch

426. “The idea of killing himself was now more real to him than it had ever been, and he understood for the first time how it is that men can prefer extinction to the continuation of agonizing mental pain. He simply must somehow stop himself from suffering in this way. A guilt about Sophie roved sharply inside him and a cinematograph in his head re-enacted and re-enacted certain scenes. He must, he thought, now somehow switch himself off or else move on into some new and even more awful mode of being.”

— Iris Murdoch

427. “If only he could be loved by somebody new.”

— Iris Murdoch

428. “It was all very simple. I just loved her. I couldn’t stop. I haven’t stopped. Oh God.”

— Iris Murdoch

429. “Was this strange mode of life to go on and on?”

— Iris Murdoch

430. “There are mysterious agencies of the human mind which, like roving gases, travel the world, causing pain and mutilation, without their owners having any full awareness, or even any awareness at all, of the strength and the whereabouts of these exhalations... So it is that we can be terrors to each other, and people in lonely rooms suffer humiliation and even damage because of others in whose consciousness perhaps they scarcely figure at all.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

432. “Oh my life is so awful, it’s just so awful to be me, you don’t know what it’s like waking every morning and finding the whole horror of being yourself still there.”

— Iris Murdoch

433. “I could scarcely believe what I saw and I had the sense as in a nightmare of being involved in something both wildly improbable and relentlessly inevitable. This had to happen. Yet how could it have happened?”

— Iris Murdoch

434. “A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance.”

— Iris Murdoch

435. “Misery had certainly given her energy, a sense of identity, a powerful questing will. It was even impressive. His part however was to be lucid and disappointing and cold. The least tenderness or excitement, the least foothold in his heart, and he and she would both be in danger.”

— Iris Murdoch

436. “It’s terrible that one doesn’t love people forever.”

— Iris Murdoch

437. “Mary did not believe in analysing herself, and she had left vague the notion that sometimes came to her that this anxious unfulfilled sort of loving was the only kind of which she was capable.”

— Iris Murdoch

438. “Perhaps one could not live with such knowledge. One might die for it, or of it.”

— Iris Murdoch

439. “And all the time my very soul would travel with her, invisible and crying soundlessly with pain. I had acquired a dimension of suffering which would poison and devour my whole being, as far as I could see, forever.”

— Iris Murdoch

440. “I’ve thought about nothing else but you.”

— Iris Murdoch

441. “Happy love undoes the self and makes the world visible. Unhappy love is, or can be, a revelation of pure suffering.”

— Iris Murdoch

442. “I wanted to drag us all down into some common pool of feeling, I wanted to stop this conventional machine of awful insincere politeness.”

— Iris Murdoch

443. “You know when things get inside you and you can’t stop going round and round the same piece of misery.”

— Iris Murdoch

444. “Here memory was simply a cold cloud to be shuddered at.”

— Iris Murdoch

445. “Literature must always represent a battle between real people and images’.”

— Iris Murdoch

446. “Anyway, as you say, what the hell. I know, I’ve been to hell, I’ve seen it, I’ve been shown round. I’ll kill myself. You’ll see, you’ll be sorry.”

— Iris Murdoch

447. “The lid has come off and whatever was inside it has certainly got out. Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder?”

— Iris Murdoch

448. “You can’t imagine what it’s like when every moment you’re conscious you’re in the most frightful pain.”

— Iris Murdoch

449. “And I was upset to find how really reluctant I was to leave my little flat. It was as if I was almost frightened. Spasms of prophetic homesickness pierced me as I rearranged the china and dusted it with my handkerchief, obsessive visions of burglaries and desecrations.”

— Iris Murdoch

450. “She thought, this is the end of happiness, darkness begins here.”

— Iris Murdoch