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

“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

“People have disappointed me and deceived me and let me down.”
― 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

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

“He also wanted to destroy something, everything, perhaps himself.”
― 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

“You can't kiss me and vanish.”
― 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

“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 He had a heavy sense of being left in total isolation; everyone had withdrawn from him and the person who could most have helped him was pre-empted by another.”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

“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

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

“I am just a past with no present.”
― 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

“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

“A woman in love is a great spiritual force.”
― 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

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

“Their hands touched, their knees touched. They were both trembling.”
― 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

“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. Love did not move toward life, it moved toward death, toward the roaring sea-caves of annihilation. Or it led to the futility of a little broken bird's egg whose remains were now being washed away by water from the tap. Even so one day God might crack the universe and wash away its fruitless powerless loves with a deluge of indifferent power.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“If only it were over, done, without the awful doing of it.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“It is unfortunately for us both also the truth that I love you and only you utterly and permanently and to distraction.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“There is a pointlessness of summer London more awful than anything which fogs or early afternoon twilights are able to evoke, a summer mood of yawning and glazing eyes and little nightmare-ridden sleeps in bored and desperate rooms. With this ennui, evil comes creeping through the city, the evil of indifference and sleepiness and lack of care. At such a time the long-fought temptation is wearily yielded to, and the long-dreamt-of crime is with shoulder-shrugging casualness committed at last.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“He had ceased to be interested in anyone but himself.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“You rail on us all for not being saints."

"Yes, yes, yes. And when I stop that railing I shall be dead. It is the only thing I know and I shall cry it out again and again, like a tedious little bird with only one song.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“It is the long still moment of dreamy suspended passion before the spinning clutching descent.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“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