Murdoch Mysteries Quotes

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

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.

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.

Once in an endless meadow, just able to peer through the tawny haze of the grass tops, the child who was myself had watched a young fox catching mice, an elegant newly minted fox, straight from the hand of God, brilliantly ruddy, with black stockings and a white-tipped brush. The fox heard and turned. I saw its intense vivid mask, its liquid amber eyes. Then it was gone. An image of such beauty and such mysterious sense. The child wept and knew himself an artist.

How mysterious night and day are, this endless procession off dark and light....I think such sad thoughts - of people in trouble and afraid, all lonely people all prisoners.

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.

I must proceed to my next mystery and for the moment forget this one completely.

But suicides are mysterious, and one must respect their mystery.

I will not attempt to describe how I got through the next few days. There are desolations of the spirit which can only be hinted at. I sat there huge-eyed in the wreck of myself.

The room, the wall, trembled with precision, as if the inanimate world were about to utter a word.

I feel full of the mystery of life at the moment. (Odd how things sometimes seem tinkling and empty and then full, full.) An overwhelming sensation that almost makes me speechless.

So art becomes not communication but mystification.

Good-bye to the past, with its mysteries which would never be fully unfolded.

I have battered destructively and in vain upon the mystery of someone else's life and must cease at last.

Even those novelists most commonly deemed “philosophical” have sometimes answered with an emphatic no. Iris Murdoch, the longtime Oxford philosopher and author of some two dozen novels treating highbrow themes like consciousness and morality, argued that philosophy and literature were contrary pursuits. Philosophy calls on the analytical mind to solve conceptual problems in an “austere, unselfish, candid” prose, she said in a BBC interview broadcast in 1978, while literature looks to the imagination to show us something “mysterious, ambiguous, particular” about the world. Any appearance of philosophical ideas in her own novels was an inconsequential reflection of what she happened to know. “If I knew about sailing ships I would put in sailing ships,” she said. “And in a way, as a novelist, I would rather know about sailing ships than about philosophy.

I have always attributed a great importance to eyes. How mysteriously expressive those damp orbs can be; the eyeball does not change and yet it is the window of the soul. And colour in eyes is, in its nature and inherence, quite unlike colour in any other substance. Mr Osmand had grey eyes, but his eyes were hard and speckled like Aberdeen granite, while Tommy’s were clear and empty like light smoke.

@The darkest and most complex novel in (the Murdoch) series.

In so far as there were mysteries and depths in my life I kept them secret from Christ and his soldiery. I was more moved by animals than I was by Jesus.

. . . the superiority of some infinite reserve and the mystery of some infinite sadness.

The mysterious awful changes which alter the human face from youth to age may gently dally and delay, then act decisively all at once.

What a mystery a marriage was. What a strange and violent world, the world of matrimony. I was glad to be outside it. The idea of it filled me with a sort of queasy pity.

Perhaps his demons were quite other.

This is the fundamental wisdom that suffuses Iris Murdoch’s fiction from Under the Net onward. True virtue, true goodness, true love flow from respect for the strangeness and the mystery of other people and the world that surrounds us. They flow from the refusal to inflict our own designs on them, to deny their innate elusiveness, their impenetrable quiddity.

They had become, year by year, month by month, mysterious to her, her love for them an extended pain, a web or field of force, of which she felt at times the almost breaking tension.

Cambridge by moonlight was light blue and brownish black. There was no mist here and a great vault of clear stars hung over the city with an intent luxurious brilliance. It was the sort of night when one knows of other galaxies. My long shadow glided before me on the pavement. Although it was not yet eleven o'clock the place seemed empty and I moved through it like a mysterious and lonely harlequin in a painting: like an assassin.

Since parting company with the priesthood he could almost be said to have become demoralised. Almost, for somehow he remained someone, a slightly mysterious someone, whom they respected, and they gave him the benefit of every doubt.

I have felt more passion with less comfort elsewhere: the mysterious deep half-blind preferences of human beings for each other, the quick probing tentacles that seek in the dark, why one inexplicably and yet certainly loves A and is indifferent to B.

There are violent things in my heart. Perhaps they have been festering there ever since that change. And now I have run in here to find some different pain, some mystery of myself to keep secret, something which, for this short time, is absolutely not Jack.

One morning, one day, perhaps soon, she would come to him and find him gone; and she knew how much she did not want to see him die, and yet how much she also wished that he might die holding her hand. These thoughts induced tears, which he must not see; and she tried not to think too much about the terrible mystery which was to be enacted . . .

There are indeed many places where I could start. I might start with Rachel's tears, or Priscilla's. There is much shedding of tears in this story. In a complex explanation any order may seem arbitrary. Where after all does anything begin? That three of the four starting points I have mentioned were causally independent of each other suggests speculations, doubtless of the most irrational kind, upon the mystery of human fate.

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. Possibly a saint might be known by the utter absence of such gaseous tentacles, but the ordinary person is naturally endowed with them, just as he is endowed with the ghostly power of appearing in other people’s dreams. 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.

Dave does extra-mural work for the University, and collects about him many youths who have a part-time interest in truth. Dave’s pupils adore him, but there is a permanent fight on between him and them. They aspire like sunflowers. They are all natural metaphysicians, or so Dave says in a tone of disgust. This seems to me a wonderful thing to be, but it inspires in Dave a passion of opposition. To Dave’s pupils the world is a mystery; a mystery to which it should be reasonably possible to discover a key. The key would be something of the sort that could be contained in a book of some eight hundred pages. To find the key would not necessarily be a simple matter, but Dave’s pupils feel sure that the dedication of between four and ten hours a week, excluding University vacations, should suffice to find it. They do not conceive that the matter should be either more simple or more complex than that. They are prepared within certain limits to alter their views. Many of them arrive as theosophists and depart as Critical Realists or Bradeians. It is remarkable how Dave’s criticism seems os often to be purely catalytic in its action. He blazes upon them with the destructive fury of the sun, but instead of shrivelling up their metaphysical pretensions, achieves merely their metamorphosis from one rich stage into another. This curious fact makes me think that perhaps after all Dave is, in spite of himself, a good teacher. Occasionally he succeeds in converting some peculiarly receptive youth to his own brand of linguistics analysis; after which as often as not the youth loses interest in philosophy altogether. To watch Dave at work on these young men is like watching someone prune a rose bush. It is all the strongest and most luxuriant shoots which have to come off. Then later perhaps there will be blossoms; but not philosophical ones, Dave trusts. His great aim is to dissuade the young from philosophy. He always warns me off it with particular earnestness.

Bellamy found simply living a task of amazing difficulty. It was as if ordinary human life were a mobile machine full of holes, crannies, spaces, apertures, fissures, cavities, lairs, into one of which Bellamy was required to (and indeed desired to) fit himself. The machine moved slowly, resembling a train, or sometimes a merry-go-round. But as soon as Bellamy got on (or got in), the machine would soon eject him, sending him spinning back to a place where he was once more forced to be a spectator. Perhaps, that was in some mysterious sense his place, his destiny. But Bellamy did not want to be a spectator, nor could he (having no money of his own) afford to be one. Moreover he had never really mastered the art, apparently so simple for others, of passing the time. His failure to find a métier, to find a task which was his task, caused him continuous anxiety, nor did it occur to him to emulate the majority of mankind who positively resigned themselves, seeing no alternative, to alien and unsatisfying work. At one time he had suffered from depression, and was nearer to despair than his friends realised.

Christ was always purveyed to me by people who clearly regarded me not only as a delinquent but as an object of pity. There is an attitude of complacent do-gooding condescension which even decent people cannot conceal and even a small child can recognize. Their religion seemed to me over-lit, over-simple, covertly threatening. There was nowhere to hide. We roared out 'choruses' about sin and redemption which reduced the hugest theological dogmas to the size of a parlour trick. I rejected the theology but was defenceless against the guilt which was so fruitlessly beaten into me. The mood was brisk and impatient. Either you were saved by the blood of the Lamb or else you were for it, a black and white matter of breath-taking rewards or whipping. The efficacious Saviour almost figured to me as a sort of agent provocateur. Again and again the trick failed to work, the briskness turned to severity and the jollity ended in tears. In so far as there were mysteries and depths in my life I kept them secret from Christ and his soldiery. I was more moved by animals than I was by Jesus. One of the porters had a dog, and this dog once, as I sat beside him on the ground, touched my arm with his paw. This gentle gesture has stayed with me forever. And I remember stroking a guinea pig at school and feeling such a piercing strange pain, the realization that happiness existed, but was denied to me.

There Are No Secrets To Success As you strive toward accomplishing your goals and dreams you need to know that there are no secrets to success! Webster’s Dictionary defines a secret as something kept from public knowledge; something mysterious that is beyond general knowledge or understanding. If that were true then it would mean success is only possible for those few who have access to these great mysterious secrets. Nonsense! You Are What You Believe! Today Is YOUR Day! Today is the day you can decide to change your life. Change the way you think about things and begin to make a difference in your life. Decide to believe your life is going to be an exciting adventure. Decide to believe you will be a success. Decide to believe today is going to be better than yesterday. Decide to make a difference for someone else and you will make a difference for yourself as well. Decide and it will be TRUE FOR YOU! There are no secrets to success — because they are available to everyone. You have to WANT to know them. You have to LOOK for them. You have to DO something with them once you know them. By applying the four truths I’ve shared with you today, your life will change dramatically – success will be within your grasp and you will make a difference.

more tired than before she went to bed. The old

Mr. Kilt, editor of the Ottawa Citizen, in October of last year. Listen to this. ‘What hope is there for a society with such extremes of wealth and poverty as our civilization shows? At the bottom rotting, corroding want and squalor; at the top, enervating luxury, reckless extravagance, useless purposeless lives.

hope of such a society except that it is susceptible of fundamental reform or radical change? Consider how fruitful it is of meanness, of over-reaching, of envy, jealousy and all uncharitableness.’” Again he paused but Murdoch didn’t risk a comment, just nodded to him to go on. Seymour’s normally calm voice was full of passion. “‘How can it be anything else? A society which in its industrial constitution is at war with honour, honesty and justice, is not likely to beget generosity. It inevitably generates the vices, not the virtues, the baser not the nobler qualities of the soul.

Because nothing sells books like talk of the movie, and since Dan Murdoch won’t be writing any more books, I expect they’ll be keen to make as much money as they can from the books they have.

Ms. James: Dr. Ogden has told me that you are a Catholic. Murdoch: Yes Ms. James: Catholics face some measure of prejudice and ill will. Quite unfairly I imagine. Murdoch: One difference I suppose is that people can’t tell that I’m a Catholic just by looking at me. Ms. James: What do you do when you encounter such treatment, detective? Murdoch: I know the truth about myself Miss James, and I know that no matter what someone might say, or think about me, I must be the strongest and the best version of myself that I can possibly be. Ms. James: So go along to get along? Murdoch: No, no. Simply be better than anyone who might hate you.

If you people only knew how fatally easy it is to poison someone by mistake, you wouldn’t joke about it.” -- Cynthia Murdoch