Quotes by "Iris Murdoch"

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

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.

Most friendships are a sort of frozen and undeveloping semi-hostility.

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.

I shall not attempt here to describe my marriage. Some impression of it will doubtless emerge. For the present story, its general nature rather than its detail is important. It was not a success. At first I saw her as a life-bringer. Then I saw her as a death-bringer. Some women are like that. There is a sort of energy which seems to reveal the world: then one day you find you are being devoured. Fellow victims will know what I mean. Possibly I am a natural bachelor.

A marriage is a very secret place.

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

Christ, I loathe women. But I can't get going on the other tack either. And you needn't blush and look coy, I never fancied you. I know what you got up to with Fritzie Eitel! No—but I'd have had old Wilfred if he'd asked me. What did old Wilfred do for sex? No one ever knew. Perhaps he didn't have any, and if so good on him.

I have felt more passion with less comfort elsewhere: the mysterious deep half-blind preferences of human beings for each other, the quick probing tentacles that seek in the dark, why one inexplicably and yet certainly loves A and is indifferent to B.

So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.

Getting through time was rather the problem. The cry of 'Help me!' — but there was no one there.

Perhaps it was a case of time overflowing.

I know time doesn't heal. That's the silliest idea of all.

But oh — time has become such a torture, a slow torture. One tries to capture a piece of time that lies ahead and is full of light . . . but thinking about that just makes this awful black time even blacker.

There is a deep foundation of my being which knows not of time and change and is still and ever with Hartley, in that good place where we once were.

One knows what being in love is like and it is a very terrible thing.

Perhaps one could not live with such knowledge. One might die for it, or of it.

Everything is full of gods, ‘ cousin James once said, quoting somebody.

Everything is full of gods, cousin James once said, quoting somebody.

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