“Although he longed to see Louise, and to see Aleph, he increasingly lacked the will to go.”
Source: The Green Knight
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Famous Iris Murdoch Quotes
Source: Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals
“Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding.”
Source: Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals
“Language is a machine for making falsehoods.”
Source: Under the Net
“You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.”
Source: A Severed Head
“Actors are cave dwellers in a rich darkness which they love and hate.”
Source: The Sea, The Sea
Source: The Black Prince
Source: A Severed Head, The Black Prince, The Sea, The Sea
“I am not famous for anything in particular. I am just famous.”
Source: The flight from the enchanter
“Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.”
“confession ran in the family.”
Source: The Bell
Source: A Fairly Honourable Defeat
“What makes you imagine ... that anything of importance can be taught in a school?”
Source: The flight from the enchanter
Source: The flight from the enchanter
“evil soon makes tools out of those who don't hate it.”
Source: An Unofficial Rose: A Novel
Source: The Black Prince
“Food is a profound subject and one, incidentally, about which no writer lies.”
Source: The Sea, The Sea
“The best thing about being God would be making the heads.”
Source: A Severed Head
“How rarely can happiness be really innocent and not triumphant, not an insult to the deprived.”
Source: A Word Child
“Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hate we know not what we do.”
“Another person's illness is often harder to bear than one's own.”
Source: The Unicorn
Source: The Sea, The Sea
Source: The Black Prince
Source: The Unicorn
Source: Under the Net
Source: The Sea, The Sea
“In a happy marriage there is a continuous dense magnetic sense of communication.”
Source: A Fairly Honourable Defeat
Source: The Black Prince
“Most real relationships are involuntary.”
Source: A Severed Head, The Black Prince, The Sea, The Sea
“to be understood is not a human right. Even to understand oneself is not a human right.”
Source: A Severed Head, The Black Prince, The Sea, The Sea
“being homosexual doesn't determine a man's whole character any more than being heterosexual does.”
Source: A Fairly Honourable Defeat
“Nothing is more beautifully and acceptably self-assertive than good singing.”
Source: The Unicorn
Source: The Black Prince
“Daytime sleep is a cursed slumber from which one wakes in despair.”
Source: Under the Net
“There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together.”
Source: The Black Prince
“Real misery cuts off all paths to itself.”
Source: The Black Prince
Source: The Black Prince
“Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them.”
Source: The Sovereignty of Good
Source: From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch
“My heart was beating like an army on the march.”
Source: Under the Net
“... when caught unawares I usually tell the truth, and what's duller than that?”
Source: Under the Net
Source: Under the Net: A Novel
“The most interesting things are always happening behind one.”
Source: The flight from the enchanter
“The notion that one can liberate another soul from captivity is an illusion of the very young.”
Source: The flight from the enchanter