The past and the present are after all so close, so almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of a material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of.

— Iris Murdoch

The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.

— Iris Murdoch

There are mysterious agencies of the human mind which, like roving gases, travel the world, causing pain and mutilation, without their owners having any full awareness, or even any awareness at all, of the strength and the whereabouts of these exhalations... So it is that we can be terrors to each other, and people in lonely rooms suffer humiliation and even damage because of others in whose consciousness perhaps they scarcely figure at all.

— Iris Murdoch

There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.

— Iris Murdoch

There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.

— Iris Murdoch

There was a feeling as if I carried a small leaden coffin in the place of my heart

— Iris Murdoch

There was something factitious and brittle and thereby utterly feminine about her charm which made me want to crush her, even to crunch her. She had a slight cast in one eye which gives her gaze a strange concentrated intensity. Her eyes sparkle, almost as if they were actually emitting sparks. She is electric. And she could run faster in very high-heeled shoes than any girl I ever met.

— Iris Murdoch

To anyone who will take the trouble to become attached to her, she will immediately give a devoted, generous, imaginative and completely capricious attention, which is still a calculated avoidance of self-surrender. This is no doubt another reason why she never went into films; her private life must be an almost full-time activity. This has the sad result to that her existence is one long act of disloyalty; and when I knew her she was constantly involved in secrecy and lying in order to conceal from each of her friends the fact that she was so closely bound to all the others.

— Iris Murdoch

Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, racket, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveler, the possibility of children.

— Iris Murdoch

Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.

— Iris Murdoch