704 Quotes About Iris-murdoch

We cannot really love the dead. We love a fantasm that secretly consoles. What love sometimes mistakes for death is a kind of intense suffering, a pain that can be endured and absorbed. But the idea of a real ending, that cannot be envisaged . . . Indeed, in the language of love the concept of an ending is devoid of sense. (So we must go beyond love or utterly change it.)

(The false god punishes, the true god slays.)

Perhaps in the end the suffering is all, it's all contained in the suffering. The final atoms of it all are simply pain.

Happiness must exist. It can't all be made of pain. But what is happiness made of?

The flat was small and smelt of ancient things with which Gildas had not contended. In the sitting room shadowy photographs of Italian lakes had been hung high up by a previous tenant.

Since parting company with the priesthood he could almost be said to have become demoralised. Almost, for somehow he remained someone, a slightly mysterious someone, whom they respected, and they gave him the benefit of every doubt.

Those who occasion loss of dignity are hard to forgive.

And all the time my very soul would travel with her, invisible and crying soundlessly with pain. I had acquired a dimension of suffering which would poison and devour my whole being, as far as I could see, forever.

The room, the wall, trembled with precision, as if the inanimate world were about to utter a word.