The Green Knight Quotes

“Moy felt something snap inside her as if her heart had snapped. The heart-string, she thought — what is the heart-string?”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Well, it's such an adventure we shall talk about it forever!”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Moy thought, I shall make no more masks, something is over forever. Anyway, she thought, this time next year I shall probably be dead.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“One reward of living in hell is a certain kind of courage. I do not fear anything, certainly not morality, or your foul fantasies either.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“History is not a science, nor is it an art, though the historian must, as a writer, be an artist too, he should write well, lucidly and eloquently, and is not harmed by a lively imagination. What is history? A truthful account of what happened in the past. As this necessarily involves evaluation, the historian is also a moralist. The term 'liberal,' mocked by some, must be retained. Historians are fallible beings who must make up their own minds, constantly aware of the particularised demands of truth. What is seen as odd must be allowed to retain its oddity, upon which later a clearer light may or may not shine. There are many dangers. History must be saved from dictators, from authoritarian politics, from psychology, from anthropology, from science, above all from the pseudo-philosophy of historicism. The study of history is menaced by fragmentation, a distribution of historical thinking among other disciplines, as we see happening in the case of philosophy. Such fragmentation opens a space for false prophets, old and new. Not only the shades of Hegel and Marx and Heidegger, but also those, you know whom I mean, who would degrade history into what they call 'fabulation.' Of course it is a truism, of which much has been made, that we cannot see the past. But we can work hard and faithfully to portray it, to understand and explain it. We need this if we are to possess wisdom and freedom. What brings down dictators, what has liberated Eastern Europe? Most of all a passionate hunger for truth, for the truth about their past, and for the justice which truth begets.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Love, yes. But sometimes love must sacrifice itself in order to remain love.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“She was listening to a voice, a much loved voice, a voice of authority, which said: simplify your life, travel light, do not become involved with family problems, possessions, or the troubles of others, do not marry, marriage ends truthfulness, live with solitude, solitude is essential if real thinking is to take place. She thought, he will never forgive, me, he will despise me and cast me out, he warned me against the ambiguous Eros, the deceiver, the magician, the sophist, the maker of drugs and poisons. Of course I am in love, yes, this is love, and I am sick with it - but what follows? Do I really believe that I shall give over my life, the whole of my life, which is only just now really beginning to another person? Shall I cease forever to be the cat that walks by herself in the wild lone? What has happened to my soldierly completeness with which I was so content, my satisfaction and my pride?”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Aleph was such a prize, and he was such a pirate.'
'My mother said that Aleph would be carried off by an older man, a tycoon - well, I suppose Lucas qualified - but how can they be happy? That seems impossible.'
'I can see them as happy.'
'Beauty and the Beast. Women love Beasts.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight