Iris Murdoch

"Yes, of course, there's something fishy about describing people's feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. It's really a machine for making falsehoods. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. Almost everything except things like "pass the gravy" is a lie of a sort. And that being the case, I shall shut up. Oh, and... pass the gravy."

"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."

"He felt, in a way so familiar as to be almost dreary, the chosen victim of the gods, the self-admitted traitor, the one destined for judgment."

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

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

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

"It was extremely difficult to keep up any pace over the rocks since they were so unpredictable and devoid of reason. Their senselessness had never so much impressed me."

"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."

"Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling."

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

"Every persisting marriage is based on fear', said Peregrine. 'Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what's at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower..."

"Dora was stunned by this information. She stopped. 'Do you mean' she said, 'that they're completely imprisoned in there'Mrs. Marks laughed. 'Not imprisoned, my dear,' she said. 'They are there of their own free will. This is not a prison. It is on the contrary a place which it is very hard to get into, and only the strongest achieve it. Like Mary in the parable, they have chosen the better part."

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

"Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are. Or because we’ve been educated – if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever, that of the mind, and gives us the assurance – the confidence – to walk the path our mind, our educated mind, offers."

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