Iris Murdoch
We must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason.Collection: Light
Mathematics is good for the soul, getting things right enlivens a sense of truth, efforts to understand automatically purify desires.Collection: Effort
The bottomless bitter misery of childhood: how little even now it is understood. Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.Collection: Children
Real misery cuts off all paths to itself.Collection: Real
In a happy marriage there is a continuous dense magnetic sense of communication.Collection: Communication
... half the world starves. What a planet. And the eating, if you're lucky enough to do any. Stuffing pieces of dead animals into a hole in your face. Then munch, munch, munch. If there's anybody watching, they must be dying of laughter.Collection: Laughter
To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare's, the Cornish sea.Collection: Song
How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.Collection: Country
The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life's most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in amazement at being so valued. The past is searched for the first signs and each one is in haste to declare all that he is so that no part of his being escapes the hallowing touch.Collection: Sweet
Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.Collection: Hurt
So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.Collection: Finals
emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage.Collection: Personality
The most interesting things are always happening behind one.Collection: Interesting
There is a spider called Amaurobius, which lives in a burrow and has its young in the late summer, and then it dies when the frosts begin, and the young spiders live through the cold by eating their mother's dead body. One can't believe that's an accident. I don't know that I imagined God as having thought it all out, but somehow He was connected with the pattern, He was the pattern.Collection: Summer
The human soul is not framed for continued proximity, and the result of this enforced neighbourhood is often an appalling loneliness for which the rules of the game forbid assuagement.Collection: Loneliness
I hate solitude but I am afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself and to turn it into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls.Collection: Hate
Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!Collection: Sadness
We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedomCollection: Names
There is nothing like early promiscuous sex for dispelling life's bright mysterious expectations.Collection: Sex
Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.Collection: Jealousy
There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together.Collection: Solitude
A long marriage is very unifying, even if it's not ideal, and those old structures must be respected.Collection: Long
Daytime sleep is a cursed slumber from which one wakes in despair.Collection: Sleep
to be understood is not a human right. Even to understand oneself is not a human right.Collection: Understood
The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomime! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit : put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good.Collection: Magic
Actors are cave dwellers in a rich darkness which they love and hate.Collection: Hate
They are universal places, like churches, hallowed meeting places of all mankind.Collection: Church
To be a complete victim may be another source of power.Collection: Power
until I have been able to bury my head so deep in dear London that I can forget that I have ever been away I am inconsolable.Collection: London
Food is a profound subject and one, incidentally, about which no writer lies.Collection: Lying
That's how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that's how bloody awful it is being Irish!Collection: Wish
I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.Collection: Half
Art is not cozy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.Collection: Art
for most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter.Collection: Dream
Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.Collection: Hero
We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.Collection: Love
Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.Collection: Reading
It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness. Perhaps we don't know much about goodness.Collection: Art
evil soon makes tools out of those who don't hate it.Collection: Hate
Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder.Collection: Next
Being in love is an exhausting business.Collection: Being In Love
I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge.Collection: Voice
Intense mutual erotic love, love which involves with the flesh all the most refined sexual being of the spirit, which reveals and perhaps even ex nihilo creates spirit as sex, is comparatively rare in this inconvenient world.Collection: Love
youth is a marvelous garmentCollection: Youth
We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.Collection: Philosophy
Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding.Collection: Philosophy
The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.Collection: Communicate
I think the novel is essentially a comic form (tragedy is for the theatre), not meaning by that full of jokes, but that it is about the absurd detail of human life, the way in which one cannot fully understand what is happening. Life is muddle and jumble and ends inconclusively, and when this is presented with great comic art the sorrows of human life can be truthfully conveyed; one is moved by the spectacle, and feels that something truthful has been told in a magic way.Collection: Art
The sending of a letter constitutes a magical grasp upon the future.Collection: Writing