I want to have things clear,’ I said. ‘You’re offering me a sinecure.’ ‘I’m not sure what that is,’ said Madge, ‘but I expect it’s that.’ ‘A sinecure is when you get money for doing nothing,’ I said. ‘But isn’t that exactly what you’ve always wanted?’ said Madge.

— Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Quotes

We’re all sinners. We all hurt each other just by existing.

— Iris Murdoch

There may be no God, but there’s decency and – and there’s truth and trying to stay there, I mean to stay in it, in its sort of light, and trying to do a good thing and to hold onto what you know to be a good thing even if it seems stupid when you come to do it.

— Iris Murdoch

I cannot now remember the exact sequence of events in those prehistoric years. That we cannot remember such things, that our memory, which is our self, is tiny, limited and fallible, is also one of those important things about us, like our inwardness and our reason. Indeed it is the very essence of both.

— Iris Murdoch

There had been anguish, fear, indecision, then gradually the brightness of her presence cast beforehand, obliterating all else. Then I was with her and there was strange blankness, and utter calm of delight. Suddenly, down into the furthest crannies of being all was well. It was all so strangely simple too, with a blameless simplicity as of childhood.

— Iris Murdoch

Death drives away what rules everywhere else, the aesthetic.

— Iris Murdoch

It is evening. The sea is golden, speckled with white points of light, lapping with a sort of mechanical self-satisfaction under a pale green sky. How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life.

— Iris Murdoch

Tenderness and absolute trust and communication and truth matter more and more as one grows older. Somehow let us not waste love, it is rare. Can we not love each other at last in freedom, without awful possessiveness and violence and fear? Love matters, not ‘in love’. Let there be no more partings now. Let there be peace between us now forever, we are no longer young. Love me, love me enough.

— Iris Murdoch

The conversation in the Old Brompton Road was more like an experience of the inferno, but lovers are accustomed to fire.

— Iris Murdoch

There were many people, she said, and Michael was but too ready to credit her since he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls.

— Iris Murdoch

It’s just one of the wonders of the world.

— Iris Murdoch

People may be settled into ways of life which preclude continued happiness, but which are satisfactory and far to be preferred to alternatives.

— Iris Murdoch

Hand in hand the children began to run homeward through the soft warm drizzle.

— Iris Murdoch

The past buries the past and must end in silence, but it can be a conscious silence that rests open-eyed.

— Iris Murdoch

One reward of living in hell is a certain kind of courage. I do not fear anything, certainly not morality, or your foul fantasies either.

— Iris Murdoch

Love, yes. But sometimes love must sacrifice itself in order to remain love.

— Iris Murdoch

I can browse indefinitely in a stationer’s shop, indeed there is hardly anything in a good stationer’s which I do not like and want.

— Iris Murdoch

The activity of translating, which had seemed the plainest thing in the world, turned out to be an act so complex and extraordinary that it was puzzling to see how any human being could perform it.

— Iris Murdoch

Sham dead,’ I said. ‘Dead! Dead dog!’ I hoped that this word was in his vocabulary. It was. In a moment Mars’s legs sagged and his body became limp and he slid to the ground, his eyes turning back and his mouth hanging open. It was terribly convincing. I was quite upset.

— Iris Murdoch

I want to have things clear,’ I said. ‘You’re offering me a sinecure.’ ‘I’m not sure what that is,’ said Madge, ‘but I expect it’s that.’ ‘A sinecure is when you get money for doing nothing,’ I said. ‘But isn’t that exactly what you’ve always wanted?’ said Madge.

— Iris Murdoch

There is something compelling about the sound of a fountain in a deserted place. It murmurs about what things do when no one watches them. It is the hearing of an unheard sound.

— Iris Murdoch
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