1,162 Quotes by Iris Murdoch

I feel I'm at the end of something — everything is going to be different — and terrible.""That doesn't sound like you, you ride every wave.""There is one that will drown me.

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.

As for me — there is another partner waiting for me, a teacher whom I knew long ago — his name is solitude. I am glad to be back here among my English friends . . . But I shall come back here to an empty flat and close the door, and I shall lean back against the door, as I recall I used to when I was young, and breathe deeply and feel the deep relief and liberation of coming home to solitude, coming home to myself.

You talk of freedom — I've never had it! I've been lonely and miserable and in despair, and you want me to consent to all that all over again!

Yes, I am free, she said to herself, but it's not like ordinary freedom, it's being in hell, a brilliant lucid hell.

In the torpor of the afternoon the remembered road had the slightly menacing and elusive familiarity of a place in a dream when one thinks: I have been here, yet where is it and what is going to happen?

I love you. I saw you that night in the garden, and I knew you were magic like in dreams.

That art gives charm to terrible things is perhaps its glory, perhaps its curse. Art is a doom.

You're such an agonizer, Bradley. You romanticize art. You're a masochist about it, you want to suffer, you want to feel that your inability to create is continuously significant.