Iris Murdoch

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

There was something factitious and brittle and thereby utterly feminine about her charm which made me want to crush her, even to crunch her. She had a slight cast in one eye which gives her gaze a strange concentrated intensity. Her eyes sparkle, almost as if they were actually emitting sparks. She is electric. And she could run faster in very high-heeled shoes than any girl I ever met.

People have disappointed me and deceived me and let me down.

Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

Your infatuation will end in tears.

youth is a marvelous garment

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved

I know girls aren't supposed to tell, but I've got to tell — just in case you should fail to love me because you never knew how much I loved you. I want not to have to say later — I wish I'd told him.

Human beings crave for novelty and welcome even wars. Who opens the morning papers without the wild hope of huge headlines announcing another great disaster? Provided of course that it affects other people and not oneself. Rupert liked order. But there is no man who likes order who does not give houseroom to a man who dreams of disorder. The sudden wrecking of the accustomed scenery, so long as one can be fairly sure of a ringside seat, stimulates the bloodstream. And the instinctive need to feel protected and superior ensures, for most of the catastrophes of mankind, the shedding by those not immediately involved of but the most crocodile of tears.

Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.

Even if readers claim that they 'take it all with a grain of salt', they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and because anything which is written down is likely to be 'true in a way'.

Only take someone's hand in a certain way, even look into their eyes in a certain way, and the world is changed forever.

Those who cry out the truth to an indifferent world too often weary, fall silent or come to doubt their own wit.

She was not just a wild creature, she was a wounded creature.

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.