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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the recaptured 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.

— Iris Murdoch

That's how vile I am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that's how bloody awful it is being Irish!

— Iris Murdoch

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

— Iris Murdoch

The death of God has set the angels free. And they are terrible. There are principalities and powers. Angels are the thoughts of God. Now he had been dissolved into his thoughts which are beyond our conception in their nature and their multiplicity and their power. God was at least the name of something which we thought was good. Now even the name has gone, and the spiritual world is scattered. There is nothing anymore to prevent the magnetism of many spirits.

— Iris Murdoch

The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.

— Iris Murdoch

The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.

— Iris Murdoch

The past and present are after all so close, 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