Iris Murdoch Quotes

¿Cuál es la diferencia que existe entre yo y estas pequeñas y humildes criaturas? La araña teje su tela, no puede hacer otra cosa. Yo tejo mi conciencia, esta charlatana compulsiva, esta voz vaga y errabunda que pronto enmudecerá. Pero todo es un sueño. La realidad es demasiado dura.

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

His heart ached in such a familiar way, and the very familiarity of it pained him.

Good art shows us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differently the world looks to an objective vision.

I crave for love, everybody does . . . and I've never had a bloody crumb of it — and I've given so much love to people — I can really love people, I can, I let them walk over me — but nobody's ever loved me.

The same virtues, in the end, the same virtue (love), are required throughout, and fantasy (self) can prevent us from seeing a blade of grass just as it can prevent us from seeing another person. An increasing awareness of 'goods' and the attempt (usually only partially successful) to attend to them purely, without self, brings with it an increasing awareness of the unity and interdependence of the moral world. One-seeking intelligence is the image of faith.

I need love, I've never felt more in need of it than now. I feel so terribly terribly unhappy.

"It's not my fault! It can't make any difference, can it?"

"You understand nothing. You are a destroyer, a black spiteful destroyer. You are the sort of person who goes around in a dream smashing things . . . You aren't really here at all."

We are all potentially demons to each other, but some close relationships are saved from this fate.

I'm not young. I've never had any youth.

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.

They really wanted to remain always in their own house and their own garden. There are such people.

Only sometimes at night when I think that you live now and are somewhere, I shed tears.

But it was just luck really if the girls survived. You're like a man firing a machine gun into a supermarket who happens not to become a murderer.

She tasted for the first time honey-sweet and dangerous happiness: dangerous because, as she before long began to learn, precarious.