The Nice and the Good Quotes

“But one must do something about the past. It doesn’t just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“People have disappointed me and deceived me and let me down.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“A love without reservation ought to be a life force compelling the world into order and beauty. But that love can be so strong and yet so entirely powerless is what breaks the heart.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“Why do I always have to be helping people . . . and getting no help myself?”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“There are mysterious agencies of the human mind which, like roving gases, travel the world, causing pain and mutilation, without their owners having any full awareness, or even any awareness at all, of the strength and the whereabouts of these exhalations... So it is that we can be terrors to each other, and people in lonely rooms suffer humiliation and even damage because of others in whose consciousness perhaps they scarcely figure at all.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“He also wanted to destroy something, everything, perhaps himself.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“But she felt that she had to see him or she would die.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“You can't kiss me and vanish.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“She thought sadly, gaiety and laughter are not in my destiny.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“I must admit that I am in a state of utter wretchedness and have been for a long time. I didn't know that such extreme unhappiness could continue for so long.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“I am just a past with no present.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“There's no point in talking it over. It would only make things worse. There's nothing to say. I just love you. That's all of it."

"That's half of it," said Ducane. "Possibly over dinner I might tell you the other half.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“I am out of the saga, he thought. He had a heavy sense of being left in total isolation; everyone had withdrawn from him and the person who could most have helped him was pre-empted by another.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“Their hands touched, their knees touched. They were both trembling.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“I might say too that you are the person who ought to help me, since you do bear some responsibility for having awakened in me such an immense, such a truly monstrous degree of love.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“Even what we are most certain of we know only in an illusory form.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“You can't imagine what it's like when every moment you're conscious you're in the most frightful pain.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“A woman in love is a great spiritual force.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“Sometimes I just feel so shut in, with all those people and they've all got something while I've got nothing.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“Yet she knew too that she was deeply discontented and she sometimes suffered fierce feral moods of confused yearning during which it seemed to her that her whole life was a masquerade and that she was piously acting the part of a kindly affectionate serviceable woman who was just not herself.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“Sex comes to most of us with a twist.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“But very few ordeals are redemptive and I doubt if the descent into hell teaches anything new. It can only hasten processes which are already in existence, and usually this just means that it degrades. You see, in hell one lacks the energy for any good change. This indeed is the meaning of hell.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned for one’s ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonizing preoccupation with self.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“He felt sad, sad.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“You are sad."

"I am always sad.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“It's so sad, all our house seems broken apart, everyone is going.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“I'm falling in love with you again, most terribly in love."

"I've never been out of love with you, never for a second.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“The calmness was the final tone of despair.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“The whole thing, the way it all happened, was shattering. And what it shattered most of all was some conception I'd had of myself, some wholeness.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“It's much better that I should read the letter. Otherwise I shall be endlessly wondering what was in it.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good