What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world

“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.”
― Iris Murdoch

“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.”
― Iris Murdoch

“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.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Red and the Green

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

“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.”
― Iris Murdoch

“Youth is a marvelous garment”
― Iris Murdoch, The Bell

“As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of non-being, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.”
― Iris Murdoch, Nuns and Soldiers

“We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“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.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.”
― Iris Murdoch

“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.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“Every human soul has seen, perhaps before their birth pure forms such as justice, temperance, beauty and all the great moral qualities which we hold in honour. We are moved towards what is good by the faint memory of these forms simple and calm and blessed which we saw once in a pure, clear light being pure ourselves.”
― Iris Murdoch

“What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved”
― Iris Murdoch

“We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?”
― Iris Murdoch, Nuns and Soldiers

“Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Bell

“Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.”
― Iris Murdoch

“One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.”
― Iris Murdoch

“(I think I fell in love with you when you were shouting at Romeo and Juliet, 'Don't touch each other!')”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“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.”
― Iris Murdoch

“I ate and drank slowly as one should (cook fast, eat slowly) and without distractions such as (thank heavens) conversation or reading. Indeed eating is so pleasant one should even try to suppress thought. Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Every meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“Love doesn't think like that. All right, it's blind as a bat--'
'Bats have radar. Yours doesn't seem to be working.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“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.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Bell