Iris Murdoch Quotes

Anyone who is observant, who discovers the person they have always dreamed of, knows that sexual energy comes into play before sex even takes place. The greatest pleasure isn't sex, but the passion with which it is practiced. When the passion is intense, then sex joins in to complete the dance, but it is never the principal aim.

We can safely say, therefore, that whereas some moralists may find it possible to make a distinction between two spheres and reigns-one of flesh, the other of the spirit, one of time, the other of eternity-where ever love arises such definitions vanish, and a sense of life awakens in which all such oppositions are at one.

It is a well-established fact that in healthy loving women, uninjured by the too frequent lesions which result from childbirth, increasing physical satisfaction attaches to the ultimate physical expression of love. ... Love between the sexes is the highest and mightiest form of human sexual passion.

What did it feel like, I wondered, to love someone that much? So much that you couldn't even control yourself when they came close, as if you might just break free of whatever was holding you and throw yourself at them with enough force to easily overwhelm you both.

And barely ten minutes later the soft sound of wingbeats came to their ears, and Balthamos stood up eagerly. The next moment, the two angels were embracing, and Will, gazing into the flames, saw their mutual affection. More than affection: they loved each other with a passion.

Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.

I think Eros should be dirty. In Greek legend, as I'm sure you are aware, he fell in love with the minor deity Psyche. It was the Greek way of saying that, in spite of what it may believe, Love pursues the Soul, not the body; the Erotic desires the Psychic. If Love was clean and wholesome he wouldn't lust after Psyche.

Sex is my favorite sport. I'm always in the mood.

If you go on loving a person deeply, by and by sex disappears. Intimacy becomes so fulfilling, then there is no need for sex; love is enough unto itself. When that moment comes then there is the possibility of prayer dawning upon you.

The intercourse of the sexes, I have dreamed, is incredibly beautiful, too fair to be remembered. I have had thoughts about it, but they are among the most fleeting and irrecoverable in my experience.

What is commonly called love, namely the desire of satisfying a voracious appetite with a certain quantity of delicate white human flesh.

Sex is an extremely subtle undertaking, unlike going to the department store on a Sunday to buy a thermos.

Love is the burning point of life, and since all life is sorrowful, so is love. The stronger the love, the more the pain. Love itself is pain, you might say -the pain of being truly alive.

When I look into his eyes, I could see without a doubt that he loved me more than anyone else in the world, that I was his salvation, the same way that he was mine.

I don't know whether you've ever had a woman eat an apple while you were doing it. Well, you can imagine how that affects you.

Love is a spirit all compact of fire.

Romance, in its earliest surviving form, was called ‘erotika pathemata’ by the Greeks - tales of erotic suffering.

Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!

That infinite and indescribable good which is there above races as swiftly to love as a ray of light to a bright body.It gives of itself according to the ardor it finds, so that as charity spreads farther the eternal good increases upon it,and the more souls there are who love, up there, the more there are to love well, and the more love they reflect to each other, as in a mirror.

I think because of these big issues of life and death that maybe sex feels like a crass question. But for Christ sake, this is a book that is so interested in an elemental human condition. And one of the ideas about surrender is an erotic surrender, too. These folks are surrendered by destiny; they surrender to each other in certain moments, but there is a lot of erotic surrender.

I'm all for sex. Seven nights a week. Days, too.

Love is too weak a word for what I feel - I luuurve you, you know, I loave you, I luff you, two F's, yes.

I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.

Margaret was not a ready lover, but where she loved she loved passionately, and with no small degree of jealousy.

People don't want to see me having sex... I'm the queen of the 'kiss, foreplay, dissolve.' And then the 'Whoo! Good morning, tiger.