Iris Murdoch Quotes

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.

To eat, teeth must meet.

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.

The world is perhaps ultimately to be defined as a place of suffering. Man is a suffering animal, subject to ceaseless anxiety and pain and fear.

... male company, sheer complicit male company: the complicity of males which is like, indeed is, a kind of complicity in crime, in chauvinism, in getting away with things, in just gluttonously enjoying the present even if hell is all around.

I've thought about nothing else but you.

There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.

Was this strange mode of life to go on and on?

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.

Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.

One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats.

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.

Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.

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.

However, on one occasion, several years ago, I was idiot enough to take a dose of LSD. (I did it to please a woman.) I had what is known as a 'bad trip'. It was a very bad trip. I shall not attempt to describe what I experienced on that dreadful and rather shameful occasion. (I will only add: it concerned entrails.) In fact it would be extremely hard, even impossible, to put it properly into words. It was something morally, spiritually horrible, as if one's stinking inside had emerged and become the universe: a surging emanation of dark half-formed spiritual evil, something never ever to be escaped from. 'Undetachable,' I remember, was a word which somehow 'came along' with the impression of it. In fact the visual images involved were dreadfully clear and, as it were, authoritative ones and they are rising up in front of me at this moment, and I will not write about them. Of course i never took LSD again.