The Green Knight Quotes

“It was her birthday. She thought, I am always unhappy on this day.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak. You dedicate yourself passionately to something, to a project, to people, to a family, you think of nothing else for weeks and months, then suddenly it's over, it's perpetual destruction, perpetual divorce, perpetual adieu. It's likeéternel retour,it's a koan. It's like falling in love and being smashed over and over again.’
'You do, then, fall in love.’
'Only with fictions, I love players, but actors are so ephemeral. And then there’s waiting for the perfect part, and being offered it the day after you've committed yourself to something utterly rotten. The remorse, and the envy and the jealousy. An old actor told me if I wanted to stay in the trade I had better kill off envy and jealousy at the start.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“She felt intense disappointment, even a kind of guilt, as if she had missed something, perhaps forever. He had been there, she could have spoken to him. Could she call out now, cry his name? It was impossible.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“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.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“One might have all sorts of reasons for avoiding people. It's none of our business.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Don't tease me. Everything wounds me now except perfect kindness.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“But now more often the old stale hopeless weariness overcame him: the black sickness whichalmost no one else,certainly not his nearest dearest friends, couldunderstand at all.The idea of giving up the world, which had given him for a time so much life-energy, appeared now as a sort of fake suicide, a ghastly play-image of his death. This fatal falseness-of-heart was what perhaps Father Damien, on further acquaintance, had now seen in him.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“What greater torment than to see that light, and then to see it eternally withdrawn?”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“I have no close friends, that is, no friends.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“How easily one is hurt. Or is it only I who am so stupidly vulnerable.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Everything in his life now seemed to signal: too late.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Oh what a mad business, no good can come of it, only chaos, and not just chaos but evil. How did we gradually get entangled in such a terribly dangerous shambles!”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Our planet is a freak which we shall destroy by our own wicked senseless activities in the next century. Our history will very soon come to an end. Now that God is dead, we are at last presented with the truth, yes, the truth remains, but it is on a short lead. Anyway, we are nothing and it matters not what we do.”
― Iris Murdoch, 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.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“I just can't live an ordinary life, I can'tpass the time.I can't organise myself, I don't have ordinarymotivesany more. I can't even manage my body, when I go to bed I don't know where to put my arms.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“You see, I'm not mad, I suffer from depression. It's not like ordinary misery. It's like dying of boredom. It'sblack.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“I took him for a kind of buffoon. Now I see he is a devil.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“It had occurred, it hadhappened,and could never in his life be unhappened, never removed, a huge deadly black scar lasting forever.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“He suffers terribly all the time. He lives in fire.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“In a century or two this planet will have been destroyed by external cosmic forces or by the senseless activity of the human race. Human life is a freak phenomenon, soon to be blotted out. That is a consoling thought. Meanwhile we are surrounded by strange invisible entities, possibly your angels."

"I hope so."

"Ah, you think they are good, theycannotbe good, there is no good, the tendency to evil is overwhelming. One has only to think of the horrors of sex, its violence, its cruelty, its filthy vulgarity, its descent into bestial degradation. You had better go and dream in your monastery. "

"Would you come and visit me there?"

"Of course not. I do not visit. Only, unfortunately, am sometimes visited."

"You don't want to discuss — you know — what happened? My priest said —"

"No."

"I care about how you are, I love you."

"You still fail to realise how this sort of talk sickens me. Now please go. This will do for a welcome home scene. Tell them not to come. I desire to be left alone.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Sentimentally and in the soul it went on for ages, it still goes on, it goes on and on.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“He was extremely angry with Bellamy who had, when Clementneededhim, refused to be with him.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“The human mind is a weird place.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Eccentrics with unseeing eyes glided through, savouring amid so much society their own particular loneliness and private sins and sorrows.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“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 thedeeprelief and liberation of coming home to solitude, coming home tomyself.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“He said, 'Forgive me for being a liar and a fool and an utterly worthless man.' Louise replied, 'I love you.' He took her in his arms for a moment and they held each other with closed eyes.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“But now her tears dried because so many terrible emotions and speculations demanded her attention.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“I mean he'shonest,heseesthe terrible things, he doesn't try to cover them up or imagine them away — the evil of the world, the senselessness of it all, the rottenness of us ordinary people, our fantasy life, our selfishness —”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Please excuse this outpouring which perhaps makes no sense but is the utter darkness of my spirit pouring from me like black blood.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“The placewas still there, present in the sunshine, instead of being hidden far away in darkness in the confines of some tragic opera.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight