Iris Murdoch

"He felt neither guilt nor distress at the pleasure with which he was now filled by the proximity of this young creature, and when he discovered in himself even physical symptoms of his inclination he did not take fright, but continued cheerfully and serenely to see Nick whenever the ordinary run of his duties suggested it, congratulating himself upon the newly achieved solidity and rational calm of his spiritual life."

"The chief requirement of the good life... is to live without any image of oneself."

"We can only learn to love by loving."

"Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality."

"Only lies and evil come from letting people off."

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

"I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same."

"Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end."

"Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonising preoccupation with self."

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

"If we ignore the prior work of attention and notice only the emptiness of the moment of choice we are likely to identify freedom with the outward movement since there is nothing else to identify it with. But if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over."

"Almost anything that consoles us is a fake."

"Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck."

"All art is the struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous."

"Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved."

"To eat, teeth must meet."

"The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick or a self-destroying or even murderous obsession. Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge."

"Whit Meynell was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out."

"Stuart was not dismayed by his sexual feelings about the boy."

"Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods."

"Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference."

"The cry of equality pulls everyone down."

"But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art."

"I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped."

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

"The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe."

"A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia."

"The only satisfied rationalists today are blinkered scientists or Marxists."

"Serious reflexion about one's own character will often induce a curious sense of emptiness; and if one knows another person well, one may sometimes intuit a similar void in him. (This is one of the strange privileges of friendship.)"

"All metaphysical theories are inconclusively vulnerable to positivist attack."

"The role of philosophy might be said to be to extend and deepen the self-awareness of mankind."

"The novel, the novel proper that is, is about people's treatment of each other, and so it is about human values."

"We know that the real lesson to be taught is that the human person is precious and unique; but we seem unable to set it forth except in terms of ideology and abstraction."

"I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore."

"There’s something in her archness, not a tone I’d normally think to emulate, but there’s something delicious in it. Her people might be murdering and raping but really they’re thinking about what goodness is in the world, bizarre juxtapositions of that kind."

"I'm still very drawn to British women writers, especially Iris Murdoch and her impossible esoteric characters and the philosophical questions that they ask."