1,162 Quotes by Iris Murdoch

I crave for love, everybody does . . . and I've never had a bloody crumb of it—and I've given so much love to people—I can really love people, I can, I let them walk over me—but nobody's ever loved me.

You've obviously never been in love.""I have actually. And awfully. And—always—without hope—I've never had my love reciprocated ever.

Perhaps that was the only time which we should ever, ever have together. Perhaps it was something which would never, never, never come again.

One morning, one day, perhaps soon, she would come to him and find him gone; and she knew how much she did not want to see him die, and yet how much she also wished that he might die holding her hand. These thoughts induced tears, which he must not see; and she tried not to think too much about the terrible mystery which was to be enacted . . .

But the spark vanished, there was no longed-for recognition, no dawning sign of recovery. The love she had learnt in tending him was an enclosed love, muted and maimed, already mourning. They would never communicate now.

And so my life has become tiny and mean and incomplete and I must begin it again without comfort and without magic.

And she looked at her life and seemed to understand it and to grieve over it as if it were already over.

That love all belonged to the elapsed moment.

She felt intense disappointment, even a kind of guilt, as if she had missed something, perhaps forever. He had been there, she could have spoken to him. Could she call out now, cry his name? It was impossible.