The Green Knight
Iris Murdoch
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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 like éternel 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.”
“It was her birthday. She thought, I am always unhappy on this day.”
“One might have all sorts of reasons for avoiding people. It's none of our business.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Don't tease me. Everything wounds me now except perfect kindness.”
“But now more often the old stale hopeless weariness overcame him: the black sickness which almost no one else, certainly not his nearest dearest friends, could understand 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.”
“What greater torment than to see that light, and then to see it eternally withdrawn?”
“I have no close friends, that is, no friends.”
“How easily one is hurt. Or is it only I who am so stupidly vulnerable.”
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Book Keywords:
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