1,162 Quotes by Iris Murdoch

But with her I would have been faithful, with her my whole life would have been different, less rootless, less empty.

Even now I shake and tremble as I write. Memory is too weak a name for this terrible evocation. Oh Hartley, Hartley, how timeless, how absolute love is. My love for you is unaware that I am old and you perhaps are dead.

There had been a slaughter of all my other interests, and upon the strange white open scene of the future only one thing remained.

I prayed that all might be well between me and Hartley, that somehow that lifelong faithful remembering, what I now thought of as my mystical marriage, might not be lost or wasted, but somehow come to good!

And what is love anyway? Love's all over the mountain where the beautiful go to die no doubt, but I cannot attach much meaning to your idea of such a long-lasting love for someone you lost sight of so long ago. Perhaps it's something you've invented now.

This figure, which I had so vaguely, idly, noticed before was now utterly changed in my eyes. The whole world was its background. And between me and it there hovered, perhaps for the last time, the vision of a slim long-legged girl with gleaming thighs. I ran.

No one, thank God, has attempted to befriend me.

The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomimes.

Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.