Iris Murdoch Quotes

Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.

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.

Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.

I’ve been so unhappy for years, so unhappy, I don’t understand how a human being can be so unhappy all the time and still be alive.

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

Anything that consoles is fake.

Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.

Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.

Of course this chattering diary is a facade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure. Yet such pretenses are not only consolations but may even be productive of a little ersatz courage.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.