Home > Work > The Nice and the Good
41 " Could she endure it, the long vigil of death made visible? "
― Iris Murdoch , The Nice and the Good
42 " Mary held her heart, contracted into a point of agony. "
43 " They haven't been standing still in the past. "
44 " You have sometimes thought of going back?""Yes, I have, but only in a fantasy way. "
45 " But her heart was hurting her with its violence. "
46 " The past is gone, it doesn't exist any more. "
47 " Mary did not believe in analysing herself, and she had left vague the notion that sometimes came to her that this anxious unfulfilled sort of loving was the only kind of which she was capable. "
48 " Her love for men had always been somehow neurotic and unfulfilled. "
49 " I wonder if this is the end, thought Ducane, and if so what it will all have amounted to. How tawdry and small it has all been. "
50 " The calmness was the final tone of despair. "
51 " How can one discover what he feels?""I thought he might perhaps behave — quite differently with you?""No, no. We seem to know each other well but I think that's just because I parade my feelings. He's affectionate, detached, passive, absolutely passive.""He's never told you about that place?""He's never talked about himself at all. "
52 " You're always wanting to be forgiven. What do you want to be forgiven for? "
53 " A really malicious letter should be read once only and destroyed, or best of all not read at all. These things lodge in the mind. "
54 " He thought, I haven't got much longer before some sort of collapse. He could not think if this would be a collapse of mind or of body. Mind and body seemed utterly fused now in cold aching pain, and darkness. "
55 " This thought was so heavy with despair that she almost began to cry again. "
56 " He felt removed from reality. "
57 " There are eternal bonds which are made in registry offices and in churches, there are eternal bonds which are made in other and stranger and more terrible ways. "
58 " I must have been assuming that without me there it would be all cobwebs and desolation. "
59 " You can't imagine what it's like when every moment you're conscious you're in the most frightful pain. "
60 " 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. "