1,162 Quotes by Iris Murdoch

I have no close friends, that is, no friends.

Oh my life is so awful, it's just so awful to be me, you don't know what it's like waking every morning and finding the whole horror of being yourself still there.

I just want to serve and help people and be good to everybody, only it always goes wrong somehow—I think about suicide all the time, every bloody day I want to die and stop this torture, but I go crawling on . . . I'm so Christ-awful bloody lonely I could scream with it for hours on end.

All chances of happiness are gone from me. Just being with myself is hell all the time anyway.

But I've got a kind of misery that makes me blind and deaf. You wouldn't understand. You live in the open with all of you spread out around you. I'm mangled in a machine. Even to say it's my own fault doesn't mean anything.

The only consolation I had was buying things. If I bought some pretty thing it cheered me up for a while.

I will not attempt to describe how I got through the next few days. There are desolations of the spirit which can only be hinted at. I sat there huge-eyed in the wreck of myself.

There was something factitious and brittle and thereby utterly feminine about her charm which made me want to crush her, even to crunch her. She had a slight cast in one eye which gives her gaze a strange concentrated intensity. Her eyes sparkle, almost as if they were actually emitting sparks. She is electric. And she could run faster in very high-heeled shoes than any girl I ever met.

I lit another cigarette and wondered distantly how I would get through the day. It was a problem demanding some ingenuity.