Iris Murdoch Love Quotes

Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

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

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

Art and morality are, with certain provisos…one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

I know how much you grieve over those who are under your care: those you try to help and fail, those you cannot help. Have faith in God and remember that He will is His own way and in His own time complete what we so poorly attempt. Often we do not achieve for others the good that we intend but achieve something, something that goes on from our effort. Good is an overflow. Where we generously and sincerely intend it, we are engaged in a work of creation which may be mysterious even to ourselves - and because it is mysterious we may be afraid of it. But this should not make us draw back. God can always show us, if we will, a higher and a better way; and we can only learn to love by loving. Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected but made perfect. The way is always forward, never back.

let us not waste love, it is rare enough

Love doesn't think like that. All right, it's blind as a bat--' 'Bats have radar. Yours doesn't seem to be working.

(I think I fell in love with you when you were shouting at Romeo and Juliet, 'Don't touch each other!')

Love is the Extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real

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.

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.

I had deluded myself throughout by the idea of reviving a secret love which did not exist at all.

When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it. But then what one achieves is no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of co-existence; and this too is one of the guises of love.

This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart...

And now she had run into an emptiness more final than any words of rejection. He was gone and would make himself a stranger to her for ever.

Only take someone's hand in a certain way, even look into their eyes in a certain way, and the world is changed forever.

A childhood hatred, like a childhood love, can last a lifetime.

One can be too ingenious in trying to search out the truth. Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face. Of course this is a love story.

He felt misery, loneliness, a terrible need for love.

A love without reservation ought to be a life force compelling the world into order and beauty. But that love can be so strong and yet so entirely powerless is what breaks the heart.

Love generates, or rather reveals, something which may be called absolute charm. In the beloved nothing is gauche. Every move of the head, every tone of the voice, every laugh or grunt or cough or twitch of the nose is as valuable and revealing as a glimpse of paradise.

It is in the capacity to love, that is to SEE, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists. The freedom which is a proper human goal is the freedom from fantasy, that is the realism of compassion. What I have called fantasy, the proliferation of blinding self-centered aims and images, is itself a powerful system of energy, and most of what is often called 'will' or 'willing' belongs to this system. What counteracts the system is attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love.

You know what. You've killed me and sent me to hell, and you must descend to the underworld to find me and make me live again. If you don't come for me, I'll become a demon and drag you down into the dark.

I am sorry," said Monty. "I cannot respond to you in any way. I am just not sufficiently interested in anything you have to say.

Somehow I've always wanted the ones that didn't want me. I'm the absolute queen bee of unrequited love.

I'll never be happy, how can you love me, I'm awful, I'm covered with spiders, I'm doomed.

I've thought about nothing else but you.

You've obviously never been in love." "I have actually. And awfully. And—always—without hope—I've never had my love reciprocated ever.

I'm the absolute queen bee of unrequited love.

He was glad that he had expressed to her, however blunderingly, what he felt. He was glad that he had held her hand.

Events stream past us like these crowds and the face of each is seen only for a minute. What is urgent is not urgent for ever but only ephemerally. All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, like itself, are made up of moments which pass and become nothing. Yet through this shaft of nothings we drive onward with that miraculous vitality that creates our precarious habitations in the past and the future. 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.

To say we were 'in love', that vague weakened phrase, cannot express it. We loved each other, we lived in each other, through each other, by each other. We were each other. Why was it such pure unadulterated pain?

But it was just luck really if the girls survived. You're like a man firing a machine gun into a supermarket who happens not to become a murderer.

I need love, I've never felt more in need of it than now. I feel so terribly terribly unhappy.

Now, when she felt so deeply connected to him, they were finally estranged.

Your love for me does not exist in the real world. Yes, it is love, I do not deny it. But not every love has a course to run, smooth or otherwise, and this love has no course at all . . . But that is remote from love and remote from ordinary life. As real people we do not exist for each other.

I crave for love, everybody does . . . and I've never had a bloody crumb of it—and I've given so much love to people—I can really love people, I can, I let them walk over me—but nobody's ever loved me.

Your coldness has ruined my life. All right, you didn't mean it, all right I was a schoolgirl, but you could have been kinder to someone who said they loved you, you could have been gentle and grateful.

Amo amas amat amamus amatis amant amavi amavisti amavit amavimus amavistis amaverunt amavero amaveris amaverit… Everything was love. Everything will be love. Everything has been love. Everything would be love. Everything would have been love. Ah, that was it, the truth at last. Everything would have been love. The huge eye, which had become an immense sphere, was gently breathing, only it was not an eye nor a sphere but a great wonderful animal covered in little waving legs like hairs, waving oh so gently as if they were under water. All shall be well and all shall be well said the ocean. So the place of reconciliation existed after all, not like a little knot hole in a cupboard but flowing everywhere and being everything. I had only to will it and it would be, for spirit is omnipotent only I never knew it, like being able to walk on the air. I could forgive. I could be forgiven. I could forgive. Perhaps that was the whole of it after all. Perhaps being forgiven was just forgiving only no one had ever told me. There was nothing else needful. Just to forgive. Forgiving equals being forgiven, the secret of the universe, do not whatever you do forget it. The past was folded up and in the twinkling of an eye everything had been changed and made beautiful and good.

What the cold light showed me was that my situation was simply unlivable. I wanted, with a desire greater than any desire which I had ever conceived could exist without instantly killing its owner by spontaneous combustion, something which I simply could not have.

Love is no respecter of ages, everyone knows that.

I'm sorry I was awful. I'm so full of terrors.

But she felt that she had to see him or she would die.

I know girls aren't supposed to tell, but I've got to tell—just in case you should fail to love me because you never knew how much I loved you. I want not to have to say later—I wish I'd told him.

You don't respect me," said Dora, her voice trembling. "Of course I don't respect you," said Paul. "Have I any reason to? I'm in love with you, unfortunately, that's all." "Well, it's unfortunate for me too," said Dora, starting to cry.

No! I can't leave him, I'm bound to him, I'm made of him, I am him!

He dreamt...he was a huge white egg floating in the sea of turquoise blue, and he was everything that there was.

Well, we all three loved and comforted each other. We were poorish and lonely and awkward together.

Sartre turns love into a ‘battle between two hypnotists in a closed room’.

You are preserving your dignity by refusing to show your feelings. But there are moments when love ought to be undignified, extravagant, even violent.

I did love her in a way, but it was under the sign of doom.

I want you to be able to see me, and as my love for you is so much of me (all of me, making me more than myself) then you must see that too.

I saw . . . what I've really know all along, that you are my truth. For me you are the way the truth and the life. Only here can I be totally myself.

A woman in love is a great spiritual force.

How can we not be dooms to each other?

Maybe there are times when one should welcome defeat, tell it to come right in and sit down.

. . . darkness was staining all the intricate channels of what had once seemed so perfect.

And I thought, rolling my head to and fro between my hands in anguish, oh if only it could have worked somehow for us two.

Well, you won't abandon me, will you." "Don't be silly, Ludens, you are buckled to my heart.

Oh what an ill fate it was that has made me love that man.

And this great love makes you both ruthless.

You're as wonderful as I expected, and I worship you for it.

I was not, except in some very broken-down sense of that ambiguous term, a love child. I was a word child.

Could one think so intensely of someone and not be visited?

Only the house was still desolate and the day had a livid ruined atmosphere, time had been damaged in some deep way, like on a day of bereavement or frightful national disaster.

No good would come of all these fine intentions.

I love you. I saw you that night in the garden, and I knew you were magic like in dreams.

He's had a bloody awful childhood. Like I had. Those things get passed on and on.

I might say too that you are the person who ought to help me, since you do bear some responsibility for having awakened in me such an immense, such a truly monstrous degree of love.

The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak. You dedicate yourself passionately to something, to a project, to people, to a family, you think of nothing else for weeks and months, then suddenly it's over, it's perpetual destruction, perpetual divorce, perpetual adieu. It's like éternel retour, it's a koan. It's like falling in love and being smashed over and over again.’ 'You do, then, fall in love.’ 'Only with fictions, I love players, but actors are so ephemeral. And then there’s waiting for the perfect part, and being offered it the day after you've committed yourself to something utterly rotten. The remorse, and the envy and the jealousy. An old actor told me if I wanted to stay in the trade I had better kill off envy and jealousy at the start.

I am out of the saga, he thought. He had a heavy sense of being left in total isolation; everyone had withdrawn from him and the person who could most have helped him was pre-empted by another.

There's no point in talking it over. It would only make things worse. There's nothing to say. I just love you. That's all of it." "That's half of it," said Ducane. "Possibly over dinner I might tell you the other half.

It was not simply that I frenziedly desired what I could not have. That was but a blunt and unrefined kind of suffering. I was condemned to be with her even in her very rejection of me. And how long and how slow and how long-drawn-out that rejection would be. Still temptation would follow where she was. Endlessly she would give herself to others taking me with her. Like an obscene puny familiar I would sit in the corners of bedrooms where she kissed and loved. She would make consort with my foes, she would adore those that mocked me, she would drink contempt for me from alien lips. And all the time my very soul would travel with her, invisible and crying soundlessly with pain.

Oh God, that conversation last night or this morning or whenever that devil-ridden scrap of nightmare had been. How could two rational beings go on and on simply saying the same awful things to each other week after week, month after month?

But whatever she was I loved her and was committed to her and had always been, here and out beyond the stars, those stars behind stars behind stars which I had seen that night when I lay on the rocks and the golden sky slowly turned the universe inside out.

Look Moy, see the chimneys, they've lit all the fires, they must have known we were going to try to drown ourselves. And Anax is running on ahead to bring the news.

If only he could be loved by somebody new.

but it was love in an inferno: that terrible relentless withholding of forgiveness.

I wanted consolation, I wanted love, I wanted, to save me, some colossal and powerful love such as I had never known before.

We did really love each other . . . didn't we? Didn't we? In the name of that reality — M.

He simply would not have married anybody whom he loved in that rather simple mediocre sort of way.

Perhaps the crime was that of letting himself be loved so much more than he loved.

I know her by intuition as if she were inside my head.

Anyway people never fall in love suddenly like that except in novels.

Happiness. What's that? I don't know. How can one be happy when one loves a demon?

I accused Hartley of being a 'fantasist', or perhaps that was Titus's word, but what a 'fantasist' I have been myself. I was the dreamer, I the magician. How much, I see as I look back, I read into it all, reading my own dream text and not looking at the reality. Hartley had been right when she said of our love that it was not part of the real world. It had no place.

The same virtues, in the end, the same virtue (love), are required throughout, and fantasy (self) can prevent us from seeing a blade of grass just as it can prevent us from seeing another person. An increasing awareness of 'goods' and the attempt (usually only partially successful) to attend to them purely, without self, brings with it an increasing awareness of the unity and interdependence of the moral world. One-seeking intelligence is the image of faith.

Misery had certainly given her energy, a sense of identity, a powerful questing will. It was even impressive. His part however was to be lucid and disappointing and cold. The least tenderness or excitement, the least foothold in his heart, and he and she would both be in danger.

He said, 'Forgive me for being a liar and a fool and an utterly worthless man.' Louise replied, 'I love you.' He took her in his arms for a moment and they held each other with closed eyes.

The idea of killing himself was now more real to him than it had ever been, and he understood for the first time how it is that men can prefer extinction to the continuation of agonizing mental pain. He simply must somehow stop himself from suffering in this way. A guilt about Sophie roved sharply inside him and a cinematograph in his head re-enacted and re-enacted certain scenes. He must, he thought, now somehow switch himself off or else move on into some new and even more awful mode of being.

I saw her simplicity, her ignorance, her childish unkindness, her unpretty anxious little face. She was not beautiful or brilliantly clever. How false it is to say that love is blind. I could even judge her, I could even condemn her, I could even, in some possible galactic loop of thought, make her suffer.

The lover readily imagines that he and his mistress are one. He feels he has love enough for both and that his loving will can swathe the two of them together like twin nuts in a shell. But what one loves is, after all, another human being, a person with other interests, other pains, in whose world one is oneself an object among others.

She was her death now, that death which she had so much striven to emulate in life, which she had studied and practised and loved. She had succeeded, and death and she had converged into a single point. Who knew if that was victory or defeat? His last vision was of the white veil that hid her now. After all, and at last, she had become utterly private.

Death is not the consummation of oneself but just the end of oneself. Before the self vanishes nothing really is, and that is how it is most of the time. But as soon as the self vanishes everything is, and becomes automatically the object of love. Love holds the world together, and if we could forget ourselves everything in the world would fly into a perfect harmony, and when we see beautiful things that is what they remind us of.

When I think of the books I love, there’s always a little laughter in the dark. I love Jane Eyre; I don’t love Wuthering Heights. I love Tolstoy; I don’t love Dostoevsky. I love Joyce; I don’t love Proust. I love Nabokov; I don’t love Pasternak. I don’t think I’m a funny person, but the fiction I grew up on was leavened with humor—I understand the other tradition and I admire it, but I just don’t love it. It never occurs to me to write as, say, A. S. Byatt writes, as I’m sure she would never dream in a squillion years of writing like me. The ironic theme in English writing—and I don’t mean po-mo irony, I mean the irony of someone like Defoe or Dickens—is either in you or it isn’t. Those who find Austen arch and cold and ironical, lacking the kind of intimate and metaphysical commitment of a writer like Emily Brontë cannot be convinced otherwise and vice versa. I appreciate both schools, but I can’t get out of the side I’m on. I don’t think I’d want to, though occasionally I have wet dreams about turning into Iris Murdoch.

The trouble with you, Charles, is that basically you despise women, whereas I, in spite of some appearances to the contrary, do not." "I don't despise women. I was in love with all Shakespeare's heroines before I was twelve." "But they don't exist, dear man, that's the point. They live in the never-never land of art, all tricked out in Shakespeare's wit and wisdom, and mock us from there, filling us with false hopes and empty dreams. The real thing is spite and lies and arguments about money.

It is not simply that suppression of self is required before accurate vision can be obtained. The great artist sees his objects (and this is true whether they are sad, absurd, repulsive or even evil) in a light of justice and mercy. The direction of attention is, contrary to nature, outward, away from self which reduces all to a false unity, towards the great surprising variety of the world, and the ability so to direct attention is love.

In a century or two this planet will have been destroyed by external cosmic forces or by the senseless activity of the human race. Human life is a freak phenomenon, soon to be blotted out. That is a consoling thought. Meanwhile we are surrounded by strange invisible entities, possibly your angels." "I hope so." "Ah, you think they are good, they cannot be good, there is no good, the tendency to evil is overwhelming. One has only to think of the horrors of sex, its violence, its cruelty, its filthy vulgarity, its descent into bestial degradation. You had better go and dream in your monastery." "Would you come and visit me there?" "Of course not. I do not visit. Only, unfortunately, am sometimes visited." "You don't want to discuss — you know — what happened? My priest said — " "No." "I care about how you are, I love you." "You still fail to realise how this sort of talk sickens me. Now please go. This will do for a welcome home scene. Tell them not to come. I desire to be left alone.

I contemplated her, seeing her young bland face looking at me, now removed as if behind a gauze curtain. She quietly invited me to suffer. There was a great space now, a great silent hall in which this suffering could take place. There was no urgency now, nothing to plan, nothing to achieve. What shall I do with it, I asked her, what shall I do now with my love for you which you so terribly revived by reappearing in my life? Why did you come back, if you could not content me? What can I do now with the great useless machine of my love which has no wholesome work to do? I can do nothing for you any more, my darling. I wondered if I would be fated to live with this love, making of it a shrine which could not now be desecrated. Perhaps when I was living alone and being everyone's uncle like a celibate priest I would keep this fruitless love as my secret chapel. Could I then learn to love uselessly and unpossessively and would this prove to be the monastic mysticism which I had hoped to attain when I came away to the sea?

Perhaps our thoughts hold the dead captive as they do the living; and perhaps their thoughts can touch us too. 'What are you thinking?' she had cried. 'Oh how it maddens me not to know!' Or was it he who had said that? Alive, their love had been a mutual torment. Death, which might have imposed a merciful silence upon this dialogue, had not done so. He had so often wanted to silence her thoughts. Were they silent now, or were they still gabbling away just on the other side of his awareness? Could not the survivor end this wicked servitude and set at liberty the frenzied ghost? How was this to be done? They had loved each other. How little this seemed now to avail. Love was itself the madness.