The Sacred and Profane Love Machine Quotes

“And now she had run into an emptiness more final than any words of rejection. He was gone and would make himself a stranger to her for ever.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“You know what. You've killed me and sent me to hell, and you must descend to the underworld to find me and make me live again. If you don't come for me, I'll become a demon and drag you down into the dark.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“I am sorry," said Monty. "I cannot respond to you in any way. I am just not sufficiently interested in anything you have to say.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“Somehow I've always wanted the ones that didn't want me. I'm the absolute queen bee of unrequited love.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“I'm the absolute queen bee of unrequited love.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“The idea of killing himself was now more real to him than it had ever been, and he understood for the first time how it is that men can prefer extinction to the continuation of agonizing mental pain. He simply must somehow stop himself from suffering in this way. A guilt about Sophie roved sharply inside him and a cinematograph in his head re-enacted and re-enacted certain scenes. He must, he thought, now somehow switch himself off or else move on into some new and even more awful mode of being.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“I'm sorry I was awful. I'm so full of terrors.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“Maybe there are times when one should welcome defeat, tell it to come right in and sit down.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“Misery had certainly given her energy, a sense of identity, a powerful questing will. It was even impressive. His part however was to be lucid and disappointing and cold. The least tenderness or excitement, the least foothold in his heart, and he and she would both be in danger.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“How can we not be dooms to each other?”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“I saw . . . what I've really know all along, that you are my truth. For me you are the way the truth and the life. Only here can I be totally myself.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“He's had a bloody awful childhood. Like I had. Those things get passed on and on.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“I love you. I saw you that night in the garden, and I knew you were magic like in dreams.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“No good would come of all these fine intentions.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“Only the house was still desolate and the day had a livid ruined atmosphere, time had been damaged in some deep way, like on a day of bereavement or frightful national disaster.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“. . . darkness was staining all the intricate channels of what had once seemed so perfect.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“Oh God, that conversation last night or this morning or whenever that devil-ridden scrap of nightmare had been. How could two rational beings go on and on simply saying the same awful things to each other week after week, month after month?”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“Could one think so intensely of someone and not be visited?”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“He dreamt...he was a huge white egg floating in the sea of turquoise blue, and he was everything that there was.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“Good-bye to the past, with its mysteries which would never be fully unfolded.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“I had the illusion of conversing with a fellow being without a barrier, without a steel door, without a black hood over my head . . . I have never, I think, impressed upon you how almost impossible I find it to communicate with anybody.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“He could go back and take her in his arms. If only he knew how to do this. But they had lost the language of their affections, they had lost the style.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“Oh if only only only we could be happy and ordinary like other people.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“It is unjust, it is so unjust, was her thought. I have never been recognized as myself.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“Blaise has always lived in a dream world."

"We all live in dream worlds," said Monty.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“Getting through time was rather the problem. The cry of 'Help me!' — but there was no one there.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“I suddenly feel . . . as if he might never come. There are 'nevers' in people's lives. People go away, people die, it does happen —”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“. . . none of these things had really got to happen at all, since she could prevent them. The power of pure destruction was still hers. She could still make it death or glory.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“Extreme continuing unhappiness often consoles itself with images of death which may in a sense be idle, but which can play a vital part in consolation and also in the continuance of illusion. If that happens I am dead, consoles, and also dulls the edge of speculation and even of conscience. It is another way of saying, to me that cannot happen.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“How irrevocably spoilt, down to its minutest detail, his world was now. Even the countryside was spoilt, the animals, the birds, the flowers. There was nowhere to run to.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine