704 Quotes About Iris-murdoch

But I've had such a rotten life. People like me are a problem.

I lead a worthless life, he thought, I live in unreality and untruth. If only there could be total change, regeneration, escape. If only I could run and run and get back to the people, back to where real wholesome, ordinary life is being lived. I have given myself a mean role and cannot now stop enacting it. Oh if only I could get out! But even as he thought these familiar thoughts he knew: unreality is my reality, untruth is my truth, I am too old now and I have no other way.

You don't know what it's like to be me, you don't know what it's like to be all tattered and destroyed inside.

I don't like you, I love you. You're a portent for me, a sign. I've always lived by signs.

I was now, all the time, unutterably tired as if simply keeping alive was a terrible effort.

The trouble with people nowadays is they don't know how to do nothing.

Your love for me does not exist in the real world. Yes, it is love, I do not deny it. But not every love has a course to run, smooth or otherwise, and this love has no course at all . . . But that is remote from love and remote from ordinary life. As real people we do not exist for each other.

I wanted consolation, I wanted love, I wanted, to save me, some colossal and powerful love such as I had never known before.

I could scarcely believe what I saw and I had the sense as in a nightmare of being involved in something both wildly improbable and relentlessly inevitable. This had to happen. Yet how could it have happened?