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The Nice and the Good QUOTES

The Nice and the Good QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " 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

3 " 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

4 " But jealousy is a dreadful thing, Jessica. It is the most natural to us of the really wicked passions and it goes deep and envenoms the soul. It must be resisted with every honest cunning and with the deliberate thinking of generous thoughts, however abstract and empty these may seem in comparison with that wicked strength... There is no merit, Jessica, in a faithfulness which is poison to you and captivity to him. "

― Iris Murdoch , The Nice and the Good

5 " 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

6 " Yet it all seemed inevitable and perhaps it was. Is it fruitless to think about the past and build up coherent pictures of how one's life went wrong? "

― Iris Murdoch , The Nice and the Good

7 " Don't be hurt by me."

"I can't help being hurt — "

― Iris Murdoch , The Nice and the Good

8 " We're just living on our emotions and eating each other. "

― Iris Murdoch , The Nice and the Good

9 " Her time consisted of seeing him, waiting, and seeing him again, of presence, absence, presence. She watched him anxiously, muting her love, instinctively afraid of making him feel trapped or guilty. She touched him very carefully with superficial lingering touches as if to extract some essence, some strong salve, to keep her through those empty absence times. The world still came to her only through him. He became aware of a wrought-up intensity of suffering which she could not forbear occasionally to let him glimpse . . . Ducane at last decided that there was only one remedy, the brutal one of a complete parting. "

― Iris Murdoch , The Nice and the Good

10 " He felt as if he were being used, as if Willy were using him as a hard neutral surface against which to crush, like insects, the thoughts which haunted him. "

― Iris Murdoch , The Nice and the Good

11 " People have disappointed me and deceived me and let me down. "

― Iris Murdoch , The Nice and the Good

12 " You can't kiss me and vanish. "

― Iris Murdoch , The Nice and the Good

13 " Ducane knew that Willy had looked forward to this visit. He knew too that the visit was rendering Willy unspeakably miserable. "

― Iris Murdoch , The Nice and the Good

14 " Are we not somehow compelled by love? I shall not let one day pass without giving you the assurance of mine. Surely there is a future for us together. I am yours yours yours. "

― Iris Murdoch , The Nice and the Good

15 " 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

16 " It is the long still moment of dreamy suspended passion before the spinning clutching descent. "

― Iris Murdoch , The Nice and the Good

17 " She thought sadly, gaiety and laughter are not in my destiny. "

― Iris Murdoch , The Nice and the Good

18 " 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

19 " 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

20 " I am just a past with no present. "

― Iris Murdoch , The Nice and the Good