Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “My personal peculiarities could not offend her since she was totally uninterested in my pretensions to be a person.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

403. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

410. “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

411. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

415. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

421. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

424. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

427. “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

428. “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

429. “Coming events do cast shadows.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

431. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

435. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

437. “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

438. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

441. “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

442. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

444. “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

445. “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

446. “I saw through a black veil of misery and remorse and indecision and fear; and there was a feeling as if I carried a small leaden coffin in the place of my heart.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

448. “Charles, don’t destroy yourself,” said James. “Why are you always so intent on breaking everything that surrounds and supports you?”

— Iris Murdoch

449. “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

450. “Yes of course I was in love with my own youth. Aunt Estelle? Not really. Who is one’s first love?”

— Iris Murdoch