1,162 Quotes by Iris Murdoch

It's not my fault! It can't make any difference, can it?""You understand nothing. You are a destroyer, a black spiteful destroyer. You are the sort of person who goes around in a dream smashing things . . . You aren't really here at all.

I know her by intuition as if she were inside my head.

The morning brought the crisis of my life. But it was not anything that I could have conceived of in my wildest imaginings.

I believe that unfulfilled frustrated people probably spend a lot of their lives in pure fantasy-dreaming. This can I am sure be a great source of consolation though not always harmless.

But there can be intuitions even here of a more sublime agony.

We cannot really love the dead. We love a fantasm that secretly consoles. What love sometimes mistakes for death is a kind of intense suffering, a pain that can be endured and absorbed. But the idea of a real ending, that cannot be envisaged . . . Indeed, in the language of love the concept of an ending is devoid of sense. (So we must go beyond love or utterly change it.)

(The false god punishes, the true god slays.)

Perhaps in the end the suffering is all, it's all contained in the suffering. The final atoms of it all are simply pain.

Happiness must exist. It can't all be made of pain. But what is happiness made of?