1,162 Quotes by Iris Murdoch

You can't imagine what it's like when every moment you're conscious you're in the most frightful pain.

She would give ease to his too long wandering heart, and then he could live more fully in the world of other people, more able, because more happy, to give them his full attention.

Mary thought suddenly, this is an abomination, sitting here and having this conventional conversation when I feel so desperate and deprived and torn inside. She thought, is there nothing I can do about it?

I know how he is . . . and I can see he's not a convenient man to be in love with.

A woman in love is a great spiritual force.

You're always wanting to be forgiven. What do you want to be forgiven for?

I must tell her, but later, later, later, when it's all long finished and no longer an agony.

I must have been assuming that without me there it would be all cobwebs and desolation.

So it is that we can be terrors to each other, and people in lonely rooms suffer humiliation and even damage because of others in whose consciousness perhaps they scarcely figure at all.