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A Severed Head QUOTES

A Severed Head QUOTES

1 " I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture. "

― Iris Murdoch , A Severed Head

2 " To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare's, the Cornish sea. "

― Iris Murdoch , A Severed Head

3 " This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart... "

― Iris Murdoch , A Severed Head

4 " There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship... "

― Iris Murdoch , A Severed Head

5 " I was now, all the time, unutterably tired as if simply keeping alive was a terrible effort. "

― Iris Murdoch , A Severed Head

6 " Your love for me does not exist in the real world. Yes, it is love, I do not deny it. But not every love has a course to run, smooth or otherwise, and this love has no course at all . . . But that is remote from love and remote from ordinary life. As real people we do not exist for each other. "

― Iris Murdoch , A Severed Head

7 " I could not see other human beings at present. "

― Iris Murdoch , A Severed Head

8 " There is a time limit to how long a spirited young person can be kept in cold storage. "

― Iris Murdoch , A Severed Head

9 " I said, "Your brother is in bed with my wife." I added, "I just took them up some wine in bed. "

― Iris Murdoch , A Severed Head

10 " The trouble with people nowadays is they don't know how to do nothing. "

― Iris Murdoch , A Severed Head

11 " It was for me a moment of great peace. I did not know then that it was the last, the very last moment of peace, the end of the old innocent world, the final moment before I was plunged into the nightmare of which these ensuing pages tell the story. "

― Iris Murdoch , A Severed Head

12 " This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart, was something I had not experienced with any other woman. "

― Iris Murdoch , A Severed Head

13 " Cambridge by moonlight was light blue and brownish black. There was no mist here and a great vault of clear stars hung over the city with an intent luxurious brilliance. It was the sort of night when one knows of other galaxies. My long shadow glided before me on the pavement. Although it was not yet eleven o'clock the place seemed empty and I moved through it like a mysterious and lonely harlequin in a painting: like an assassin. "

― Iris Murdoch , A Severed Head

14 " I could scarcely believe what I saw and I had the sense as in a nightmare of being involved in something both wildly improbable and relentlessly inevitable. This had to happen. Yet how could it have happened? "

― Iris Murdoch , A Severed Head

15 " I was perhaps moreover a little the dupe of that illusion of lovers that the beloved object must, somehow, respond, that an extremity of love not only merits but compels some return. "

― Iris Murdoch , A Severed Head

16 " With a fluency that amazed me lies and treachery streamed from my lips. I was in extreme pain. "

― Iris Murdoch , A Severed Head

17 " What I really wanted just then was to put Georgie in cold storage. It is unfortunate that other human beings cannot be conveniently immobilized. "

― Iris Murdoch , A Severed Head

18 " It had all been quite uncannily painless. I was left with a sense of not having suffered enough. Only sometimes in dreams did I experience certain horrors, glimpses of punishment which would perhaps yet find its hour. "

― Iris Murdoch , A Severed Head

19 " I wanted consolation, I wanted love, I wanted, to save me, some colossal and powerful love such as I had never known before. "

― Iris Murdoch , A Severed Head

20 " To describe one's character is difficult and not necessarily illuminating. The story which follows will reveal, whether I will or no, what sort of person I am. "

― Iris Murdoch , A Severed Head