Quotes by Iris Murdoch

Sartre turns love into a ‘battle between two hypnotists in a closed room’.

However, on one occasion, several years ago, I was idiot enough to take a dose of LSD. (I did it to please a woman.) I had what is known as a bad trip. It was a very bad trip. I shall not attempt to describe what I experienced on that dreadful and rather shameful occasion. (I will only add: it concerned entrails.) In fact it would be extremely hard, even impossible, to put it properly into words. It was something morally, spiritually horrible, as if ones stinking inside had emerged and become the universe: a surging emanation of dark half-formed spiritual evil, something never ever to be escaped from. Undetachable, I remember, was a word which somehow came along with the impression of it. In fact the visual images involved were dreadfully clear and, as it were, authoritative ones and they are rising up in front of me at this moment, and I will not write about them. Of course i never took LSD again.

But jealousy is a dreadful thing, Jessica. It is the most natural to us of the really wicked passions and it goes deep and envenoms the soul. It must be resisted with every honest cunning and with the deliberate thinking of generous thoughts, however abstract and empty these may seem in comparison with that wicked strength... There is no merit, Jessica, in a faithfulness which is poison to you and captivity to him.

We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?

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

We brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out.

Never seen the sea! How could anyone not have seen the sea? Surely the sea must somehow belong to the happiness of every child.

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

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

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

Im the absolute queen bee of unrequited love.

As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.

The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.

Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.

Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

Happiness is a matter of ones most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.

In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.