Best Iris Murdoch Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings Page 5

“The absence of the loved person is so absolute.”

Loss Sad Absence Iris Murdoch Absolute Final

Book:The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

Source: The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“That too was part of a machine from which she had not, for all her 'feelings' and her 'principles', the spirit or the courage really to escape.”

Sad Stuck Trapped Iris Murdoch Escape No Escape

Book:The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

Source: The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“Forgive me for not being able to be with you.”

Sad Breakup Iris Murdoch The Message To The Planet Dear John Letter

Book:The Message To The Planet

Source: The Message To The Planet

“I don't think I can marry, I'm not fit for it, I'm not real enough. That's the trouble. I'm a puppet that's realised what's wrong with itself and it's horrible. I'm propped up somewhere all alone, watching the real people go past. I'm propped up crying in a corner.”

Sad Misery Metaphor Iris Murdoch Alienation Single Left Out Unloved The Message To The Planet Outsider

Book:The Message To The Planet

Source: The Message To The Planet

“You've obviously never been in love." "I have actually. And awfully. And—always—without hope—I've never had my love reciprocated ever.”

Love Sad Painful Dialogue Iris Murdoch Unrequited Love In Love The Black Prince Unreciprocated Love

Book:The Black Prince

Source: The Black Prince

“I crave for love, everybody does . . . and I've never had a bloody crumb of it—and I've given so much love to people—I can really love people, I can, I let them walk over me—but nobody's ever loved me.”

Love Sad Iris Murdoch Unrequited Love The Black Prince Unloved Unreciprocated Love Debasing

Book:The Black Prince

Source: The Black Prince

“I'm not young. I've never had any youth.”

Youth Sad Iris Murdoch The Message To The Planet Old Soul Burdens Aged

Book:The Message To The Planet

Source: The Message To The Planet

“But the spark vanished, there was no longed-for recognition, no dawning sign of recovery. The love she had learnt in tending him was an enclosed love, muted and maimed, already mourning. They would never communicate now.”

Sad Iris Murdoch Unrequited Love Unspoken Finality The Message To The Planet Missed Opportunity Star Crossed Lovers

Book:The Message To The Planet

Source: The Message To The Planet

“Ludens experienced, as an extra pain, an intimation of the happiness he might have felt in such a place.”

Sad Painful Iris Murdoch The Message To The Planet If Only Intimation

Book:The Message To The Planet

Source: The Message To The Planet

“He . . . felt as if, wanting to be needed by everyone, he were merely becoming some sort of semi-invisible messenger.”

Sad Iris Murdoch Needy Overlooked Taken For Granted The Message To The Planet Messenger Put Upon

Book:The Message To The Planet

Source: The Message To The Planet

“Ludens felt that everyone around him was living in the present, a place where he certainly could not live.”

Sad Iris Murdoch Alienation The Message To The Planet The Present

Book:The Message To The Planet

Source: The Message To The Planet

“He looked so sad. I never saw him look sad before, he was always so superior, everywhere the king. You once called him a god from elsewhere who had lost his way.”

God Sad Iris Murdoch King The Message To The Planet Superior Otherworldly Humbled Dethroned

Book:The Message To The Planet

Source: The Message To The Planet

“Perhaps that was the only time which we should ever, ever have together. Perhaps it was something which would never, never, never come again.”

Sad Separation Iris Murdoch The Black Prince Never Again Come And Gone Lost Chance Once Only

Book:The Black Prince

Source: The Black Prince

“Ludens thought, why can't I do that, why can't I just ask a woman to hold my hand, why can't I ask Franca to!”

Sad Iris Murdoch Unspoken Holding Hands The Message To The Planet Timid

Book:The Message To The Planet

Source: The Message To The Planet

“Ludens felt again that special curious anguish caused by glimpses of a happiness he would have felt if only things were different — which could be different, perhaps could easily be different — but somehow maddeningly were not.”

Happiness Sad Iris Murdoch Elusive Unattainable The Message To The Planet If Only

Book:The Message To The Planet

Source: The Message To The Planet

“. . . the superiority of some infinite reserve and the mystery of some infinite sadness.”

Mystery Sad Description Iris Murdoch Reserved The Message To The Planet Characterization

Book:The Message To The Planet

Source: The Message To The Planet

“And so my life has become tiny and mean and incomplete and I must begin it again without comfort and without magic.”

Life Magic Sad Unhappy Iris Murdoch Henry And Cato Diminished Comfortless

Book:Henry and Cato

Source: Henry and Cato

“He wished he was not always young again in his dreams, it made waking up so sad.”

Young Dreams Sad Iris Murdoch Henry And Cato

Book:Henry and Cato

Source: Henry and Cato

“The new world, he thought, the new life, and how sad it is. I suppose I should be congratulating myself, it may even be that later I shall look back on this as heaven.”

Perspective Sad New World Iris Murdoch New Life Hindsight Henry And Cato

Book:Henry and Cato

Source: Henry and Cato

“And she looked at her life and seemed to understand it and to grieve over it as if it were already over.”

Life Understanding Sad Iris Murdoch Resigned Self Evaluation Henry And Cato

Book:Henry and Cato

Source: Henry and Cato

“That love all belonged to the elapsed moment.”

Love Sad Iris Murdoch The Past Henry And Cato

Book:Henry and Cato

Source: Henry and Cato

“We did really love each other . . . didn't we? Didn't we? In the name of that reality — M.”

Love Reality Sad Breakup Iris Murdoch Letter A Severed Head Epistolary

Book:A Severed Head

Source: A Severed Head

“Yet the love is there, the love is there — only it's as if it's so wounded it has curled up and gone into a black hole.”

Love Sad Iris Murdoch Wounded The Green Knight

Book:The Green Knight

Source: The Green Knight

“The presence of so many things which ought to have delighted her and been her friends brought home to Moy how little delight she could now feel and how alienated she now was from all the beings to which she had once felt so close.”

Sad Depression Unhappy Isolated Iris Murdoch The Green Knight Alienated

Book:The Green Knight

Source: The Green Knight

“She dreamt she saw the Polish Rider passing slowly by and he was weeping and she called out to him, but he turned his head away. She dreamt that she was drowning in the pool of tears.”

Dreams Sad Iris Murdoch Crying The Green Knight Allusion Rembrandt The Polish Rider

Book:The Green Knight

Source: The Green Knight

“I've felt so sad for years about you. My love for you has always had a sad face.”

Love Sad Iris Murdoch The Sea The Sea Doomed Love Doomed Romance

Book:The Sea, The Sea

Source: The Sea, The Sea

“There is a deep foundation of my being which knows not of time and change and is still and ever with Hartley, in that good place where we once were.”

Time Change Sad Memory Iris Murdoch The Past The Sea The Sea

Book:The Sea, The Sea

Source: The Sea, The Sea

“Never swim in a rough sea, dear boy, this sea's a killer. But the past refused to come back, as it did in dreams, to be remade. Titus walked in my dreams in the brightness of his youth, which was now made eternal. Or else I dreamed that he was dead and felt joy on waking.”

Death Dreams Sea Sad Iris Murdoch The Past Irrevocable The Sea The Sea Redo

Book:The Sea, The Sea

Source: The Sea, The Sea

“God, how the young and beautiful vanish and are no more seen.”

Beauty Youth Sad Iris Murdoch The Sea The Sea Young And Beautiful Vanish

Book:The Sea, The Sea

Source: The Sea, The Sea

“It had occurred, it had happened, and could never in his life be unhappened, never removed, a huge deadly black scar lasting forever.”

Sad Scar Iris Murdoch The Green Knight Irrevocable Life Altering Point Of No Return

Book:The Green Knight

Source: The Green Knight

“We shall meet, but as strangers. It is the end of an era. A whole part of my life is torn away.”

Sad Separation Breakup Iris Murdoch Parting Strangers The Green Knight The End Of An Era

Book:The Green Knight

Source: The Green Knight

“You rail on us all for not being saints." "Yes, yes, yes. And when I stop that railing I shall be dead. It is the only thing I know and I shall cry it out again and again, like a tedious little bird with only one song.”

Judging Criticism Obsession Judgement Iris Murdoch Judgmental Repetitive The Nice And The Good

Book:The Nice and the Good

Source: The Nice and the Good

“It is unfortunately for us both also the truth that I love you and only you utterly and permanently and to distraction.”

Love Obsession Iris Murdoch The Nice And The Good Declaration Of Love One And Only Only You

Book:The Nice and the Good

Source: The Nice and the Good

“Bereavement is my occupation and it absorbs me completely. You want me to touch you, to look at you with sympathy. I cannot.”

Grief Obsession Iris Murdoch Impossibility Bereavement Unfeeling Closed Off

Book:The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

Source: The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“I've thought about nothing else but you.”

Love Devotion Obsession Iris Murdoch In Love The Black Prince Thinking Of You

Book:The Black Prince

Source: The Black Prince

“You know when things get inside you and you can't stop going round and round the same piece of misery.”

Anxiety Misery Obsession Iris Murdoch Obsessive The Black Prince

Book:The Black Prince

Source: The Black Prince

“In this connection I must mention too a not altogether rational idea which I had nourished more or less vaguely for a long time: the notion that before I could achieve greatness as a writer I would have to pass through some ordeal. For this ordeal I had waited in vain. Even total war (I was never in uniform) failed to ruffle my life. I seemed doomed to quietness.”

Obsession Dull Writer Creative Process Iris Murdoch Irrational The Black Prince Ordeal Tortured Artist

Book:The Black Prince

Source: The Black Prince

“As for me — there is another partner waiting for me, a teacher whom I knew long ago — his name is solitude. I am glad to be back here among my English friends . . . But I shall come back here to an empty flat and close the door, and I shall lean back against the door, as I recall I used to when I was young, and breathe deeply and feel the deep relief and liberation of coming home to solitude, coming home to myself.”

Solitude Self Discovery Iris Murdoch The Green Knight Personification

Book:The Green Knight

Source: The Green Knight

“What a mystery a marriage was. What a strange and violent world, the world of matrimony. I was glad to be outside it. The idea of it filled me with a sort of queasy pity.”

Marriage Mystery Abuse Pity Iris Murdoch Domestic Violence Matrimony The Black Prince Outsider Observer

Book:The Black Prince

Source: The Black Prince

“This figure, which I had so vaguely, idly, noticed before was now utterly changed in my eyes. The whole world was its background. And between me and it there hovered, perhaps for the last time, the vision of a slim long-legged girl with gleaming thighs. I ran.”

Iris Murdoch Infatuation The Sea The Sea

Author:Iris Murdoch

“I adore your jealousy, especially when it's so misplaced. I expect Shakespeare wrote a sonnet about that.”

Humor Dialogue Jealousy Iris Murdoch The Message To The Planet Misplaced

Book:The Message To The Planet

Source: The Message To The Planet

“If there is any fruitless mental torment which is greater than that of jealousy it is perhaps remorse. Even the pains of loss may be less searching; and often of course these agonies combine, as now they did for me. I say remorse not repentance. I doubt if I have ever experienced repentance in a pure form; perhaps it does not exist in a pure form. Remorse contains guilt, but helpless hopeless guilt which knows of no cure for the painful bite.”

Guilt Jealousy Repentance Iris Murdoch Torment Remorse The Sea The Sea Futile

Book:The Sea, The Sea

Source: The Sea, The Sea

“I have always wanted to kill you, all my life led to that blow. Jealousy and hatred compose my earliest memories. I have killed you every day in my thoughts.”

Hatred Jealousy Motive Iris Murdoch Rivalry The Green Knight Homicidal Formative Years Murderous

Book:The Green Knight

Source: The Green Knight

“Yes, and I'm ready to wade through blood for him, but there is no blood, only a false sickly slime — I can't live in fogs and falsehoods, I must live in the open, I must find my way out, I must find someone else, and I have found someone else.”

Blood Devotion Iris Murdoch The Message To The Planet

Book:The Message To The Planet

Source: The Message To The Planet

“I must stay with you, stay near you, do your will, or die.”

Relationships Devotion Iris Murdoch The Message To The Planet

Book:The Message To The Planet

Source: The Message To The Planet

“But now her tears dried because so many terrible emotions and speculations demanded her attention.”

Tears Emotions Iris Murdoch Crying The Green Knight

Book:The Green Knight

Source: The Green Knight

“You can't go through the looking-glass without cutting yourself.”

Metaphor Iris Murdoch Consequences Through The Looking Glass Looking Glass

Book:The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

Source: The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“I feel I'm living on pain, riding on it, like a sea.”

Pain Metaphor Iris Murdoch Figurative Language

Book:The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

Source: The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“You can't go through the looking-glass without getting cut. You know that now, don't you?”

Wisdom Experience Metaphor Dialogue Iris Murdoch Consequences Query

Book:The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

Source: The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“One's mind is such an old rubbish heap. All sorts of little bits of machinery start up.”

Thoughts Metaphor Iris Murdoch The Mind

Book:The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

Source: The Sacred and Profane Love Machine