Iris Murdoch Quotes

When I'm up to something I find it very hard to realize that I probably look no different from the way I look on other occasions.

I am sorry that our friendship, or whatever name one may give to the obsessive relationship which has bound us together for so many years, should end in this way. This is not the place to utter its elegy.

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.

I want to be cut off from people like Marloe. Being a real person oneself is a matter of setting up limits and drawing lines and saying no. I don't want to be a nebulous bit of ectoplasm straying around in other people's lives. That sort of vague sympathy with everybody precludes any real understanding of anybody . . . And it precludes any real loyalty to anybody.

He can do anything he likes and I'm so lonely, oh so lonely — And I put up with it because there was nothing else to do —

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

Disapproving of things is all right. But you mustn't disapprove of people. It cuts you off.

Tell her I was young once and star-bright
Who am now invisible . . .

I am, I must confess, an obsessive and superstitious letter-writer. When I am troubled I will write any long letter rather than make a telephone call. This is perhaps because I invest letters with magical power. To desiderate something in a letter is, I often irrationally feel, tantamount to bringing it about. A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance. (And, it must be admitted, of passing the buck.) It is a way of bidding time to stop.

I know people can be awful dooms for each other.

I accused Hartley of being a 'fantasist', or perhaps that was Titus's word, but what a 'fantasist' I have been myself. I was the dreamer, I the magician. How much, I see as I look back, I read into it all, reading my own dream text and not looking at the reality. Hartley had been right when she said of our love that it was not part of the real world. It had no place.

And she did seem then to go to sleep instantly: the quick flight into oblivion of the chronically unhappy person.

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

It is strange to think that when I went to the sea I imagined that I was giving up the world. But one surrenders power in one form, and grasps it in another.

There is a time limit to how long a spirited young person can be kept in cold storage.