Iris Murdoch Quotes

I really need to be alone. I can't deal with someone sleeping next to me.

I am no longer alone with myself, and I can only artificially recall the scary and beautiful feeling of solitude. This is the shadow side of the fortune of love.

I take much pleasure in being alone but there is also a strange warm grace in not being alone.

I've led a very isolated existence since I was 6 years old. It's kind of been me and my mind.

I had led a private life and wanted to die a private death.

I always have been a private person. I like to be alone. When I was a little girl I used to listen to the radio and just be by myself.

I think everyone is lonely whether you are in a good marriage or a bad marriage somewhere down the line you become lonely, and to get rid of that loneliness you have to try really hard.

Solitude is the human condition in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about when I am alone without being able to split up into the two-in-one, without being able to keep myself company.

Most of my life I have needed more time to be on my own.

Solitude desolates me; company oppresses me.

I loved being in my own head so much, it was getting harder and harder being with other people.

She's alone, they kept telling themselves, and surely she danced in no one's arms, yet somehow that seemed to matter less and less. As the night went on, and clarinet and coyote call mingled beyond the lantern light, the magic of their own powder-blue jackets and orchids seemed to fade, and it came to them in small sensations that they were more alone than she was.

My own study of the networked life has left me thinking about intimacy - about being with people in person, hearing their voices and seeing their faces, trying to know their hearts. And it has left me thinking about solitude - the kind that refreshes and restores. Loneliness is failed solitude.

What are we when we are alone? Some, when they are alone, cease to exist.

To love makes one solitary.

Solitude is separate experience.

I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe.

One reads alone, even in another's presence.

I feel better when I am not around people. When I am alone, alone, alone.

Keeping a diary is like closing your bedroom door and refusing to come out until dinnertime: it is a declaration of self.

Lonely people console themselves with self-absorption or curiosity.

A life without a lonely place, that is, a life without a quiet center, easily becomes destructive. When we cling to the results of our actions as our only way of self-identifiction, then we become possessive and defensive and tend to look at our fellow human beings more as enemies to be kept at a distance than as friends with whom we share the gifts of life.

Shyness is a condition foreign to the heart - a category, a dimension which leads to loneliness.

Once more I realize that solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people (all naturally solitary people must feel this) precludes awareness of one's self, so after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.