The Green Knight Quotes

“It's madness —"

"Madness is where we live now.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Lucas continued, speaking pensively in a dreamy tone," The painters, you know, the painters, what they did for Christianity!”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“The wound with which she travelled vibrated within her. She thought, I shall never have what I desire. I shall become bitter and defeated and dim, and I shall never really paint, I am a freak, a crippled animal, something to be put down, put to sleep, put out of its misery.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“But he's joking, he doesn't mean it."

"When Lucas makes a joke he means it.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“How had this weird idea been conceived, how had it grown until it seemed inevitable?”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Moreover, and of course, she loved him; but in Sefton's stern code her love had always been chained up, and howled fruitlessly, as indeed it did now.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“If the fates were arranging things, it was better to leave it entirely to them.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Bellamy was sorry to hurt Clement's feelings, but he sointenselywanted to be alone where he could confront the awful cacophony of his own feelings.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“How much harm, eddying outward in fateful circles, Clement was beginning to foresee.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“If Buddhists think evil is unreal they must be mad! Thinking evil is unreal is holding hands with evil under the table!”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“I suspect the study of English literature is doing you no good, it's full of all sorts of romantic high-flown nonsense. You've been reading Shelley."

"I plead guilty to that crime.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“I don't know what love can do for theterriblethings of life.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“To find someone — oh yes — that is the problem. To have mutual love, that is so difficult indeed.”
― Iris Murdoch, 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.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“It's just that I don'thopeany more, I've lost my nerve.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Sorrow can sometimes induce sleep.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Looking toward the Polish Rider she met his calm tender gentle thoughtful gaze. She thought, what he sees is the face of death. He sees the silence of the valley, its emptiness, its innocence — and beyond it the hideous field of war on which he will die. And his poor horse will die too. He is courage, he is love, he loves what is good, and will die for it, his body will be trampled by horses' hooves, and no one will know his grave. She thought, he is so beautiful, he has the beauty of goodness.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“She thought, I shall die of misery and pain.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“I must return to my freedom which I now realise is something so essential that it makes my love for you seem like death.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“But oh — time has become such a torture, aslowtorture. One tries to capture a piece of time that lies ahead and is full of light... but thinking about that just makes this awful black time even blacker.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“A great sword pierced Sefton's heart. She too had loved Lucas with her own kind of deep secret love, and it seemed to her in this moment that, if he had asked her, she would have gone with him anywhere.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Deep, deepest inside his wounded heart. he felt the new pain, the pain which would now travel with him always.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“I am going mad, she thought, I am in some sort of silent raging grief of which I shall die, everything has gone.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Yet the love is there, the loveisthere — only it's as if it's so wounded it has curled up and gone into a black hole.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“All that had seemed impossible, too late, a dream, had suddenly become possible, even natural and inevitable.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“These words had impressed Clement deeply, inscribed upon his heart.”
― Iris Murdoch, 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.”
― Iris Murdoch, 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.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Those were the tortures of the night. The tortures of the day consisted in pretending to eat, pretending to play, pretending to be happy, passing the hours, enduring the sympathetic looks and the loving remarks.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Beyond her declaration of love she could not see. But as she rehearsed the intensity of her passion she thought that hemust,when the time came,respond.The desire to, at the right time,tellhim became, as the years moved forward toward that time, increasingly painful, like a poisoned wound that must heal itself by breaking open. Shenowthought in anguish of the times, the recent times, when she could have told him, and had been afraid to, and had clumsily withdrawn, when she could have attracted him and drawn his attention to her. When she had watched over him when he was sleeping in the sedan-chair and could have wakened him with a kiss. If only she hadlet him know,then she could more easily have borne his not preferring her. He was ready to fall in love — and if he hadknown— he must have loved her — if he had known how much she loved him. The pain of this loss burnt her in every waking moment, that awful 'if only'. She had lost him, and lost him through her own fault. There were no more pleasures now in life.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight