Iris Murdoch Quotes

The only satisfied rationalists today are blinkered scientists or Marxists.

The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.

Your coldness has ruined my life. All right, you didn't mean it, all right I was a schoolgirl, but you could have been kinder to someone who said they loved you, you could have been gentle and grateful.

I have nobody in the world. I'll kill myself. That's best. Everyone will say, It's for the best that she killed herself, she's better off dead . . . I hate myself so much I could spend hours and hours just screaming with hatred and with the pain of it, oh the pain of it . . .

I took a deep breath, however, and followed my rule of never speaking frankly to women in moments of emotion. No good ever comes of this.

Only the deeper parts of the mind have so little sense of time.

Most friendships are a sort of frozen and undeveloping semi-hostility.

Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.

The death of God has set the angels free. And they are terrible. There are principalities and powers. Angels are the thoughts of God. Now he had been dissolved into his thoughts which are beyond our conception in their nature and their multiplicity and their power. God was at least the name of something which we thought was good. Now even the name has gone and the spiritual world is scattered. There is nothing any more to prevent the magnetism of many spirits.

Love is the Extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real

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.

Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.

Perhaps there was an intimacy which did not need words.

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.

What the cold light showed me was that my situation was simply unlivable. I wanted, with a desire greater than any desire which I had ever conceived could exist without instantly killing its owner by spontaneous combustion, something which I simply could not have.