Best Iris Murdoch Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings Page 6

Source: The Message To The Planet

“I need daylight. But I wander in the dark.”

Metaphor Iris Murdoch The Message To The Planet

Source: The Message To The Planet

“Of course we have an 'unconscious mind' and this is partly what my book is about. But there is no general chart of that lost continent. Certainly not a 'scientific' one.”

Metaphor Iris Murdoch Subconscious Subconscious Mind The Black Prince Unknowable

Book:The Black Prince

Source: The Black Prince

“So. The door was open into the dark and he had but to walk through it.”

Metaphor Iris Murdoch The Message To The Planet The Dark

Book:The Message To The Planet

Source: The Message To The Planet

“And all the time the line of force which bound her to her husband stretched and vibrated so that her heart in secret haemorrhage, gushed blood.”

Marriage Blood Metaphor Connection Iris Murdoch Infidelity Strain The Message To The Planet Growing Apart

Book:The Message To The Planet

Source: The Message To The Planet

“She stood there awkwardly, incapable of further theatre.”

Metaphor Iris Murdoch The Message To The Planet Faking It

Book:The Message To The Planet

Source: The Message To The Planet

“I feel I'm at the end of something — everything is going to be different — and terrible." "That doesn't sound like you, you ride every wave." "There is one that will drown me.”

Change Giving Up Metaphor Resilience Dialogue Iris Murdoch The Green Knight The End

Book:The Green Knight

Source: The Green Knight

“We are all potentially demons to each other, but some close relationships are saved from this fate.”

Relationships Metaphor Iris Murdoch Demons Toxic Relationships The Sea The Sea Damaging

Book:The Sea, The Sea

Source: The Sea, The Sea

“Please excuse this outpouring which perhaps makes no sense but is the utter darkness of my spirit pouring from me like black blood.”

Spirit Metaphor Iris Murdoch Self Expression The Green Knight Outpouring

Book:The Green Knight

Source: The Green Knight

“Louise was a jewel locked away; and after the first 'if only' period had passed and Clement had got used to 'Mrs Anderson', he felt that his love for her had not faded, but had suffered a sea change into something special and unique, causing a special and unique and much valued, pain.”

Pain Transformation Metaphor Iris Murdoch Unrequited Love The Green Knight Sea Change If Only

Book:The Green Knight

Source: The Green Knight

“I have been struck down before my life begins. I have already died in the war.”

Metaphor Iris Murdoch The Green Knight Fatalistic Cut Short

Book:The Green Knight

Source: The Green Knight

“Oh why is she going away just when I want so much to be with her! She is the answer to the riddle of my life.”

Metaphor Separation Lovely Iris Murdoch The Green Knight

Book:The Green Knight

Source: The Green Knight

“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.”

Love Metaphor Iris Murdoch Romantic Love Cleverness Figurative Language The Unicorn

Book:The Unicorn

Source: The Unicorn

“Enormous vistas of thought were unrolling in my mind.”

Mind Metaphor Thought Iris Murdoch The Sea The Sea

Book:The Sea, The Sea

Source: The Sea, The Sea

“He felt as if he were being used, as if Willy were using him as a hard neutral surface against which to crush, like insects, the thoughts which haunted him.”

Used Thoughts Iris Murdoch Haunted The Nice And The Good Toxic Relationship

Book:The Nice and the Good

Source: The Nice and the Good

“I tried to think these thoughts but they remained intolerably abstract, while a pain in my body told me what was real.”

Mind Real Body Pain Thoughts Abstract Iris Murdoch A Severed Head

Book:A Severed Head

Source: A Severed Head

“Could one think so intensely of someone and not be visited?”

Powerful Longing Manifestation Iris Murdoch Thinking Of You Visitation

Book:The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

Source: The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“Oh Christ, if I could only have some happiness.”

Happiness Longing Unhappy Iris Murdoch Elusive The Black Prince

Book:The Black Prince

Source: The Black Prince

“Good-bye to the past, with its mysteries which would never be fully unfolded.”

Letting Go Moving On Iris Murdoch Farewell Resignation The Past Ambiguous Mysteries Unsolved

Book:The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

Source: The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“I think women, perhaps unconsciously, convey to female children a deep sense of their own discontent.”

Children Women Mothers Iris Murdoch Oppressed Subconscious Patriarchy Discontent Daughters The Black Prince

Book:The Black Prince

Source: The Black Prince

“Even now I shake and tremble as I write. Memory is too weak a name for this terrible evocation. Oh Hartley, Hartley, how timeless, how absolute love is. My love for you is unaware that I am old and you perhaps are dead.”

Love Memory Lost Love Iris Murdoch The Sea The Sea

Book:The Sea, The Sea

Source: The Sea, The Sea

“. . . none of these things had really got to happen at all, since she could prevent them. The power of pure destruction was still hers. She could still make it death or glory.”

Choices Power Destruction Iris Murdoch Ride Or Die Death Or Glory

Book:The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

Source: The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“Do you think it's ever safe to say one's happy?”

Speak Safe Happy Iris Murdoch The Nice And The Good

Book:The Nice and the Good

Source: The Nice and the Good

“I know how he is . . . and I can see he's not a convenient man to be in love with.”

Iris Murdoch In Love Inconvenient The Nice And The Good

Book:The Nice and the Good

Source: The Nice and the Good

“Why do I always have to be helping people . . . and getting no help myself?”

Relationships Desperate Help Iris Murdoch The Nice And The Good Taken Advantage Of

Book:The Nice and the Good

Source: The Nice and the Good

“But she felt that she had to see him or she would die.”

Love Absence Desperate Iris Murdoch Reunion The Nice And The Good Lovesick Parted

Book:The Nice and the Good

Source: The Nice and the Good

“Desperate for help, living his life now as a hideous dream, he had told nobody.”

Secret Desperate Iris Murdoch Distress Henry And Cato

Book:Henry and Cato

Source: Henry and Cato

“I wonder if this is the end, thought Ducane, and if so what it will all have amounted to. How tawdry and small it has all been.”

Regret Iris Murdoch Looking Back Insignificant The Nice And The Good Wasted Life The End

Book:The Nice and the Good

Source: The Nice and the Good

“I am sorry that our friendship, or whatever name one may give to the obsessive relationship which has bound us together for so many years, should end in this way. This is not the place to utter its elegy.”

Relationships Friendship Regret Breakup Iris Murdoch Unspoken The Black Prince Indescribable Inexpressible Bad Breakups

Book:The Black Prince

Source: The Black Prince

“Of course, my dear, I cannot, how could I, altogether regret what has happened.”

Regret Lovers Iris Murdoch Looking Back The Black Prince Don T Regret

Book:The Black Prince

Source: The Black Prince

“I felt at times, it is hard to describe this, almost mad with guilt, with a sort of general guilt about my whole life.”

Life Regret Guilt Guilty Iris Murdoch The Black Prince Self Reproach

Book:The Black Prince

Source: The Black Prince

“We ignore what we are doing until it is too late to alter it. We never allow ourselves quite to focus upon moments of decision; and these are often in fact hard to find even if we are searching for them.”

Blind Denial Decisions Too Late Iris Murdoch The Black Prince Irrevocable

Book:The Black Prince

Source: The Black Prince

“I'm not a lucky person who makes radiant decisions which are obviously right.”

Lucky Decisions Decision Making Iris Murdoch Right Unlucky Henry And Cato

Book:Henry and Cato

Source: Henry and Cato

“We're just living on our emotions and eating each other.”

Emotions Iris Murdoch The Nice And The Good Toxic Relationship Emotional Turmoil Mutually Destructive

Book:The Nice and the Good

Source: The Nice and the Good

“There was absolutely nothing that she could do with this huge emotion which she had so suddenly discovered in herself.”

Emotions Iris Murdoch Unrequited Love Powerless Repressed The Nice And The Good

Book:The Nice and the Good

Source: The Nice and the Good

“She had inhibited her sympathy, one genuine sympathetic impulse would have ruined her.”

Emotions Sympathy Iris Murdoch Ruined Repressed The Message To The Planet Unsympathetic

Book:The Message To The Planet

Source: The Message To The Planet

“What emotion had so invaded me? Fear? It is sometimes curiously difficult to name the emotion from which one suffers. The naming of it is sometimes unimportant, sometimes crucial.”

Fear Emotions Iris Murdoch Uncertain Overwhelmed Elusive The Black Prince Unnameable

Book:The Black Prince

Source: The Black Prince

“He felt as if something had been completed and he would never see any of those people again.”

Separation Iris Murdoch Ending The Green Knight Finality The End Completed

Book:The Green Knight

Source: The Green Knight

“I must think of him as vanished utterly and gone forever.”

Gone Separation Iris Murdoch The Green Knight Irrevocable Vanished

Book:The Green Knight

Source: The Green Knight

“The only cure here was death. They were both gone out of my life.”

Death Separation Breakup Iris Murdoch Closure Finality The Sea The Sea Cut Off

Book:The Sea, The Sea

Source: The Sea, The Sea

“But all this, all this shift and change, thought Bellamy, is part of the vast lie which surrounds me and wherein I move from one fantasy to another. I wanted to escape to solitude and darkness in a holy place, but the dark is just the old dark of meaninglessness and falsehood, which separates me from my friends and from the real world where people love and help each other.”

Depression Separation Isolated Iris Murdoch Nihilism Meaninglessness The Green Knight Cut Off

Book:The Green Knight

Source: The Green Knight

“Look Moy, see the chimneys, they've lit all the fires, they must have known we were going to try to drown ourselves. And Anax is running on ahead to bring the news.”

Humor Sweet Lovely Dialogue Iris Murdoch Ending The Green Knight Happy Ending Last Lines

Book:The Green Knight

Source: The Green Knight

“I wanted to drag us all down into some common pool of feeling, I wanted to stop this conventional machine of awful insincere politeness.”

Feeling Iris Murdoch Politeness The Sea The Sea Insincere

Book:The Sea, The Sea

Source: The Sea, The Sea

“Now that the doors of possibility had magically opened one after the other, Ludens realised how much comfort he had derived from uncertainty.”

Possibility Anxiety Uncertainty Overwhelming Iris Murdoch The Message To The Planet

Book:The Message To The Planet

Source: The Message To The Planet

“There are eternal bonds which are made in registry offices and in churches, there are eternal bonds which are made in other and stranger and more terrible ways.”

Relationships Marriage Eternal Iris Murdoch Letter Unconventional The Nice And The Good Bonds Unbreakable

Book:The Nice and the Good

Source: The Nice and the Good

“Are we not somehow compelled by love? I shall not let one day pass without giving you the assurance of mine. Surely there is a future for us together. I am yours yours yours.”

Love Iris Murdoch Letter Reassurance The Nice And The Good Declaration Of Love

Book:The Nice and the Good

Source: The Nice and the Good

“A really malicious letter should be read once only and destroyed, or best of all not read at all. These things lodge in the mind.”

Iris Murdoch Negativity Letter Malicious The Nice And The Good Poison Pen Poison Pen Letter

Book:The Nice and the Good

Source: The Nice and the Good

“He's had a bloody awful childhood. Like I had. Those things get passed on and on.”

Childhood Misery Legacy Unhappiness Trapped Iris Murdoch Unhappy Childhood Cycle Of Abuse

Book:The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

Source: The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“The only consolation I had was buying things. If I bought some pretty thing it cheered me up for a while.”

Depression Shopping Iris Murdoch Consolation The Black Prince Shopaholic Coping Strategies Cheered Up

Book:The Black Prince

Source: The Black Prince

“Sex comes to most of us with a twist.”

Sex Iris Murdoch The Nice And The Good Kink Twist

Book:The Nice and the Good

Source: The Nice and the Good