Iris Murdoch Quotes

But death is not easy, and life can win by simulating it.

You’ve got such nice hair, it seems a pity to dye it blue.

Those who occasion loss of dignity are hard to forgive.

Sometimes I feel I am crammed with demons.

Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.

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.

Now, when she felt so deeply connected to him, they were finally estranged.

Anywhere is dangerous if you carry danger with you.

You can't magic yourself out of the situation, you've got to live it as decently and as grimly as you can.

I just want to serve and help people and be good to everybody, only it always goes wrong somehow — I think about suicide all the time, every bloody day I want to die and stop this torture, but I go crawling on . . . I'm so Christ-awful bloody lonely I could scream with it for hours on end.

You imagine that to live in a state of extremity is necessarily to discover the truth about yourself. What you discover then is violence and emptiness. And of this you make a virtue.

I have no close friends, that is, no friends.

If there is any fruitless mental torment which is greater than that of jealousy it is perhaps remorse. Even the pains of loss may be less searching; and often of course these agonies combine, as now they did for me. I say remorse not repentance. I doubt if I have ever experienced repentance in a pure form; perhaps it does not exist in a pure form. Remorse contains guilt, but helpless hopeless guilt which knows of no cure for the painful bite.

The unspoken words trembled in the air.

It is sometimes said, either irritably or with a certain satisfaction, that philosophy makes no progress. It is certainly true, and I think this is an abiding and not a regrettable characteristic of the discipline, that philosophy has in a sense to keep trying to return to the beginning: a thing which it is not at all easy to do.