1,162 Quotes by Iris Murdoch

Of course Paula had revealed her trouble to no one. She preserved it in her private heart like the awful bloody arcana of a mystical religion.

The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.

Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.

This was everything that I wanted to be done with, the relaxed banality of life without goals.

All the time when I speak to you, even now, I'm saying not precisely what I think, but what will impress you and make you respond. That's so even between us - and how much more it's so where there are stronger motives for deception. In fact, one's so used to this one hardly sees it. The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods.

But very few ordeals are redemptive and I doubt if the descent into hell teaches anything new. It can only hasten processes which are already in existence, and usually this just means that it degrades. You see, in hell one lacks the energy for any good change. This indeed is the meaning of hell.

Or did I know by intuition that wonderful and terrible things were really imminent at last, trembling into being just behind the curtain of the future?

I had been confronted (at last) with a sizeable ordeal labelled with my name. This was not something to be wasted.

Things, things, they outlive us and go to scenes that we know nothing of.