The Unicorn Quotes

“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

“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

“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

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

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

“Everyone here seems to have some weird secret or other.”
― 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

“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

“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

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