Iris Murdoch citations

“People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.”

“Almost anything that consoles us is a fake.”

“The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick or a self-destroying or even murderous obsession.”

“Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.”

“One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats.”

“Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.”

“Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.”

“Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.”

“Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.”

“The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.”

“For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.”

“Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.”

“Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.”

“Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonising preoccupation with self.”

“Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.”

“Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.”

“I think being a woman is like being Irish… Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.”

“We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality" says Iris Murdoch.
But given the state of the world, is it wise?”

“One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.”

“The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.”

“Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.”

“Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wave-length of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.”

“The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.”

“What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.”

“We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.”

“People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don't admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It's the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.”