1,162 Quotes by Iris Murdoch

But one must do something about the past. It doesn’t just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing.

This then was love, to look and look until one exists no more, this was the love which was the same as death.

And what an intense heavenly blue the sea is, not a dark blue at all, but like a cauldron of light.

It's much better that I should read the letter. Otherwise I shall be endlessly wondering what was in it.

There is no light where I am. If any comes it is not enlightenment but lightning.

There was a shadowy light, not exactly twilight, but an uncertain vivid yet hazy illumination, wherein people walked like spirits, bathed in light and not revealed.

He had to go there because of Patrick; and because it was fated. Yes, that gave him courage, to feel that he had not sought it, it had come upon him, and however fruitless or disastrous that journey might be, he had to undertake it, because it was his fate.

What greater torment than to see that light, and then to see it eternally withdrawn?

Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.