The Unicorn Quotes

“ We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom”
― Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn

“Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn

“Art and psychoanalisis give shape and meaning to life and that's why we adore them. However, life as it is lived has no shape nor meaning, and that's what I am experiencing right now.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn

“She was her death now, that death which she had so much striven to emulate in life, which she had studied and practised and loved. She had succeeded, and death and she had converged into a single point. Who knew if that was victory or defeat? His last vision was of the white veil that hid her now. After all, and at last, she had become utterly private.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn

“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.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn

“What we can see determines what we choose. Good is the distant source of light, it is the unimaginable object of our desire. Our fallen nature knows only its name and its perfection. That is the idea which is vulgarized by existentialists and linguistic philosophers when they make good into a mere matter of personal choice. It cannot be defined, not because it is a function of our freedom, but because we do not know it.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn

“Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning, and that is what I am experiencing just now.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn

“Marian was suddenly overcome by an appalling crippling panic. She was very frightened at the idea of arriving. But it was more than that. She feared the rocks and the cliffs and the grotesque dolmen and the ancient secret things. Her two companions seemed no longer reassuring but dreadfully alien and even sinister. She felt, for the first time in her life, completely isolated and in danger. She became in an instant almost faint with terror.
She said, as a cry for help, ‘I’m feeling terribly nervous’.
‘I know you are,’ said Scottow.
(…)
Marian was appalled at the sudden quietness. But the insane panic had left her. She was frightened now in an ordinary way, sick in her stomach, shy, tongue-tied, horribly aware of the onset of a new world.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn

“Suffering is no scandal. It is natural. Nature appoints it. All creation suffers. It suffers from having been created, if from nothing else. It suffers from being divided from God.'
'Yours is a melancholy sort of religion, Dennis. I'm afraid I don't believe in God.'
'Ah, you do. But you do not know His name. And I who know His name am only the better of you by one little word. Here is the salmon pool.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn

“There are things which are appalling to young people because young people think life should be happy and free. But life is never really happy and free in any beautiful sense. Happiness is a weak and paltry thing and perhaps"freedom" has no meaning. There are great patterns in which we are involved, and destinies which belong to us and which we love even in the moment when they destroy us.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn

“Suffering is no scandal. It is natural. Nature appoints it. All creation suffers. It suffers from having been created, if from nothing else. It suffers from being divided from God.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn

“We are all mad sometimes, but it passes."
"The consequences do not pass.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn

“Listen to the wind. It can blow dreadfully here. In the winter it blows so that it would drive you mad. It blows day after day, and one becomes so restless. What do you think of my page?"
"Your - Mr. Nolan? He seems very devoted."
"I think he would let me kill him slowly.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn

“You say we don’t know the consequences of actions. But we don’t know the consequences of inactions either, and inactions are actions.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn

“It was like a comedy by Shakespeare. All the ends of the story were being bound up in a good way.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn

“But now, when things had happened which were too appalling to think about, when his romantic love was a corpse and his cleverness a ghost, he knew where it was he wanted to lay his head.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn

“It was too late to go to Gaze now, everyone would be in bed. It was a comforting thought. Whatever was happening it was not happening now. There was nothing he could do now. Sleep was overwhelming him again, great clouds and folds of sleep like a warm fog.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn

“This then was love, to look and look until one exists no more, this was the love which was the same as death.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn

“She did not understand music and it upset her, it had only sad, tragic things to say. These leaping forms, these pursuits and insistences, these elusive desperate repetitions, always seemed to her like one long cry of agony. She could not, in this company, allow herself the luxury of self-pitying tears, which was her highest tribute to the art. She looked about her and let the music gather to her the people with whom she was so deeply concerned.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn

“Everyone here seems to have some weird secret or other.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn

“. . . enjoying literature as those alone enjoy it who have little else to enjoy.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn

“It was odd, the life one lived in other people's dreams.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn

“She felt above all, as a sort of categorical imperative, the desire to set Hannah free, to smash up all her eerie magical surroundings, to let the fresh air in at last; even if the result should be some dreadful suffering.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn