Iris Murdoch Quotes

Of course we have an 'unconscious mind' and this is partly what my book is about. But there is no general chart of that lost continent. Certainly not a 'scientific' one.

She was a part, an evidence, of some pure uncracked unfissured confidence in the good which was never there for me again.

Mathematics is good for the soul, getting things right enlivens a sense of truth, efforts to understand automatically purify desires.

Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hate we know not what we do.

The lover readily imagines that he and his mistress are one. He feels he has love enough for both and that his loving will can swathe the two of them together like twin nuts in a shell. But what one loves is, after all, another human being, a person with other interests, other pains, in whose world one is oneself an object among others.

Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.

He suffers terribly all the time. He lives in fire.

Nothing is more beautifully and acceptably self-assertive than good singing.

The human soul is not framed for continued proximity, and the result of this enforced neighbourhood is often an appalling loneliness for which the rules of the game forbid assuagement.

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.

My heart was beating like an army on the march.

We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. but we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. we are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.

We are clay and nothing is real for us except the uncanny womb of Being into which we shall return.

I wonder if it's harder to be good in this age?

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

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

We shall meet, but as strangers. It is the end of an era. A whole part of my life is torn away.

It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown.

I have seen much of human beings over a long period, and I have learnt how little good to expect from them.

Here memory was simply a cold cloud to be shuddered at.

My personal peculiarities could not offend her since she was totally uninterested in my pretensions to be a person.

I must proceed to my next mystery and for the moment forget this one completely.

You get so worked up and flowery! You sound as if you were quoting something all the time!

Well, we all three loved and comforted each other. We were poorish and lonely and awkward together.

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality says Iris Murdoch.
But given the state of the world, is it wise?

There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.

The best you can hope for is a little peace and not too much remorse. Thoughts at peace under an English heaven.

I took him for a kind of buffoon. Now I see he is a devil.

Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.

T. S. Eliot and Jean-Paul Sartre, dissimilar enough as thinkers, both tend to undervalue prose and to deny it any imaginative function. Poetry is the creation of linguistic quasi-things; prose is for explanation and exposition, it is essentially didactic, documentary, informative. Prose is ideally transparent; it is only faute de mieux written in words. The influential modern stylist is Hemingway. It would be almost inconceivable now to write like Landor. Most modern English novels indeed are not written. One feels they could slip into some other medium without much loss. It takes a foreigner like Nabokov or an Irishman like Beckett to animate prose language into an imaginative stuff in its own right.

God lives and works in history. The outward mythology changes, the inward truth remains the same.

You can't imagine what it's like when every moment you're conscious you're in the most frightful pain.

There are moments when, if one rejects the simple and obvious promptings of duty, one finds oneself in a labyrinth of complexities of some quite new kind.

To overthrow a tyrant, whether in public or in private, one must learn to hate.

You don't understand people like me, like us, the other ones. You're like a bird that flies in the air, a fish that swims in the sea. You move, you look about you, you want things. There are others who live on earth and move just a little and don't look

What greater torment than to see that light, and then to see it eternally withdrawn?

The notion that one can liberate another soul from captivity is an illusion of the very young.

There were good times or goodish times, only the bad times were so - crucial.

Confession ran in the family.

But whatever she was I loved her and was committed to her and had always been, here and out beyond the stars, those stars behind stars behind stars which I had seen that night when I lay on the rocks and the golden sky slowly turned the universe inside out.

In a century or two this planet will have been destroyed by external cosmic forces or by the senseless activity of the human race. Human life is a freak phenomenon, soon to be blotted out. That is a consoling thought. Meanwhile we are surrounded by strange invisible entities, possibly your angels."

"I hope so."

"Ah, you think they are good, they cannot be good, there is no good, the tendency to evil is overwhelming. One has only to think of the horrors of sex, its violence, its cruelty, its filthy vulgarity, its descent into bestial degradation. You had better go and dream in your monastery."

"Would you come and visit me there?"

"Of course not. I do not visit. Only, unfortunately, am sometimes visited."

"You don't want to discuss - you know - what happened? My priest said - "

"No."

"I care about how you are, I love you."

"You still fail to realise how this sort of talk sickens me. Now please go. This will do for a welcome home scene. Tell them not to come. I desire to be left alone.

Existentialism, in both its Continental and its Anglo-Saxon versions, is an attempt to solve the problem without really facing it: to solve it by attributing to the individual an empty, lonely freedom, a freedom, if he wishes, to 'fly in the face of the facts'. What it pictures is indeed the fearful solitude of the individual marooned upon a tiny island in the middle of a sea of scientific facts, and morality escaping from science only by a wild leap of the will. But our situation is not like this.

The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness. This is the non-metaphysical meaning of the idea of transcendence to which philosophers have so constantly resorted in their explanations of goodness. 'Good is a transcendent reality' means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is. It is an empirical fact about human nature that this attempt cannot be entirely successful.

Statements made by distant church bells remind me it is Sunday. Today the sky has become cloudy. I have been watching the clouds and it occurs to me that I have never done this in my life before, simply sit and watch clouds. As a child I would have been far too anxious to 'waste time' in this way. And my mother would have stopped me. As I write this I am sitting on my plot of grass behind the house where I have put a chair, cushions, rugs. It is evening. Thick lumpy slate-blue clouds, their bulges lit up to a lighter blue, move slowly across a sky of muddy and yet brilliant gold, a sort of dulled gilt effect. At the horizon there is a light glittering slightly jagged silver line, like modern jewellery. Beneath it the sea is a live choppy lyrical goldeny-brown, jumping with white flecks. The air is warm. Another happy day. ('Whatever will you do down there?' they asked.)
In a quiet surreptitious way I am feeling very pleased with myself.

You know what. You've killed me and sent me to hell, and you must descend to the underworld to find me and make me live again. If you don't come for me, I'll become a demon and drag you down into the dark.

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.

And now she had run into an emptiness more final than any words of rejection. He was gone and would make himself a stranger to her for ever.

There are things which are appalling to young people because young people think life should be happy and free. But life is never really happy and free in any beautiful sense. Happiness is a weak and paltry thing and perhaps"freedom" has no meaning. There are great patterns in which we are involved, and destinies which belong to us and which we love even in the moment when they destroy us.

I have always attributed a great importance to eyes. How mysteriously expressive those damp orbs can be; the eyeball does not change and yet it is the window of the soul. And colour in eyes is, in its nature and inherence, quite unlike colour in any other substance. Mr Osmand had grey eyes, but his eyes were hard and speckled like Aberdeen granite, while Tommy's were clear and empty like light smoke.

Art and psychoanalisis give shape and meaning to life and that's why we adore them. However, life as it is lived has no shape nor meaning, and that's what I am experiencing right now.

A less courageous person would have felt that it was too late, they would have felt ashamed, they would think wellI don't want this, I know I shall hate it, it's all wrong, but I'm so involved now I'll have to put up with it, and I know that later on I'll keep on wishing that I'd had the nerve to say no, even at the last minute ...

Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.

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.

But I had come to where I had never been before, the blessed point of sufficient desperation.

I was now, all the time, unutterably tired as if simply keeping alive was a terrible effort.

The problems were too evident, they sat together eyeing them in silence. The stage now belonged to the young people, there would be happenings. Yet nothing happened; and Clement felt as if a magic spell had paralysed them all.

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.

I'm not interested. I never liked him. He's some sort scoundrel.

I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.

Every human soul has seen, perhaps before their birth pure forms such as justice, temperance, beauty and all the great moral qualities which we hold in honour. We are moved towards what is good by the faint memory of these forms simple and calm and blessed which we saw once in a pure, clear light being pure ourselves.

All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.

For most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter.

White magic is black magic. a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people, and demons used for good can hang around and make mischief afterwards.

One can be too ingenious in trying to search out the truth. Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face. Of course this is a love story.

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.

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

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

Real misery cuts off all paths to itself.

Anywhere is dangerous if you carry danger with you.

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.

Some people are just 'diminishers' and 'spoilers' for others. I suppose almost everybody diminishes someone. A saint would be nobody's spoiler.

Youth is a marvelous garment. How misplaced is the sympathy lavished on adolescents. There is a yet more difficult age which comes later, when one has less to hope for and less ability to change, when one has cast the die and has to settle into a chosen life without the consolations of habit or the wisdom of maturity, when, as in her own case, one ceases to be une jeune fille un peu folle, and becomes merely a woman, worst of all, a wife. The very young have their troubles, but they have at least a part to play, the part of being very young.

It had indeed been a failure of faith and courage not to wander on through the forest, not to search faithfully for his true mate, not to believe and endure.

This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart ...

This is an age of demons and amoral angels and all sorts of deep fears, like the first centuries of the Christian era, it's an age of extreme solutions.

The trouble with you, Charles, is that basically you despise women, whereas I, in spite of some appearances to the contrary, do not."

"I don't despise women. I was in love with all Shakespeare's heroines before I was twelve."

"But they don't exist, dear man, that's the point. They live in the never-never land of art, all tricked out in Shakespeare's wit and wisdom, and mock us from there, filling us with false hopes and empty dreams. The real thing is spite and lies and arguments about money.

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

Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness.

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

Forgive me for not being able to be with you.

I adore your jealousy, especially when it's so misplaced. I expect Shakespeare wrote a sonnet about that.

There is a natural tribal hostility between the married and the unmarried. I cannot stand the shows so often quite instinctively put on by married people to insinuate that they are not only more fortunate but in some way more moral than you are.

And I was upset to find how really reluctant I was to leave my little flat. It was as if I was almost frightened. Spasms of prophetic homesickness pierced me as I rearranged the china and dusted it with my handkerchief, obsessive visions of burglaries and desecrations.

So was she on the side of dragons and indifferent to the fate of princesses?

Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.

There was a shadowy light, not exactly twilight, but an uncertain vivid yet hazy illumination, wherein people walked like spirits, bathed in light and not revealed.

I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.

It was for me a moment of great peace. I did not know then that it was the last, the very last moment of peace, the end of the old innocent world, the final moment before I was plunged into the nightmare of which these ensuing pages tell the story.

But one must do something about the past. It doesn't just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing.

Things, things, they outlive us and go to scenes that we know nothing of.

Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.

Your best friends are in trouble and you say 'of course' and forget them instantly.

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.

The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.

Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.

Love is the source of our greatest errors; but when it is even partially refined it is the energy and the passion of the soul in its search for Good, the force that joins us to Good and joins us to the world through Good. Its existence is the unmistakable sign that we are spiritual creatures, attracted by excellence and made for the Good. It is a reflection of the warmth and light of the sun.