A biography for Iris Murdochhasn’t been written yet.
“I am in favour of illusion, not alienation... Drama must create a factitious spell-binding present moment and imprison the spectator in it. The theatre apes the profound truth that we are extended beings who yet can only exist in the present.”
“One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance.”
“I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time.”
“The past and the present are after all so close, so 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.”
“Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.”
“Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.”
“There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.”
“I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.”
“... male company, sheer complicit male company: the complicity of males which is like, indeed is, a kind of complicity in crime, in chauvinism, in getting away with things, in just gluttonously enjoying the present even if hell is all around.”
“But one must do something about the past. It doesn’t just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing.”
“People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.”
“I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.”
“To anyone who will take the trouble to become attached to her she will immediately give a devoted, generous, imaginative and completely uncapricious attention, which is still a calculated avoidance of self-surrender. This is no doubt another reason why she never went into films; her private life must be an almost full-time activity. This has the sad result too that her existence is one long act of disloyalty; and when I knew her she was constantly involved in secrecy and lying in order to conceal from each of her friends the fact that she was so closely bound to all the others.”
“We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.”
“Anything that consoles is fake.”
“I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.”
“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.”