A Word Child Quotes

“Amo amas amat amamus amatis amant amavi amavisti amavit amavimus amavistis amaverunt amavero amaveris amaverit… Everything was love. Everything will be love. Everything has been love. Everything would be love. Everything would have been love. Ah, that was it, the truth at last. Everything would have been love. The huge eye, which had become an immense sphere, was gently breathing, only it was not an eye nor a sphere but a great wonderful animal covered in little waving legs like hairs, waving oh so gently as if they were under water. All shall be well and all shall be well said the ocean. So the place of reconciliation existed after all, not like a little knot hole in a cupboard but flowing everywhere and being everything. I had only to will it and it would be, for spirit is omnipotent only I never knew it, like being able to walk on the air. I could forgive. I could be forgiven. I could forgive. Perhaps that was the whole of it after all. Perhaps being forgiven was just forgiving only no one had ever told me. There was nothing else needful. Just to forgive. Forgiving equals being forgiven, the secret of the universe, do not whatever you do forget it. The past was folded up and in the twinkling of an eye everything had been changed and made beautiful and good.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child

“I was not, except in some very broken-down sense of that ambiguous term, a love child. I was a word child.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child

“The whole extraordinary business was over. And I was back where I belonged, where my childhood had condemned me to be, alone, out in the cold without a coat.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child: A Novel

“He was not notably vertebrate and could hardly look after himself, so how could he look after Crystal?”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child: A Novel

“I have always attributed a great importance to eyes. How mysteriously expressive those damp orbs can be; the eyeball does not change and yet it is the window of the soul. And colour in eyes is, in its nature and inherence, quite unlike colour in any other substance. Mr Osmand had grey eyes, but his eyes were hard and speckled like Aberdeen granite, while Tommy’s were clear and empty like light smoke.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child: A Novel

“Art must invent new beauty, not play with what has already been made, religion must invent God and never rest.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child: A Novel

“There had been anguish, fear, indecision, then gradually the brightness of her presence cast beforehand, obliterating all else. Then I was with her and there was strange blankness, and utter calm of delight. Suddenly, down into the furthest crannies of being all was well. It was all so strangely simple too, with a blameless simplicity as of childhood.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child

“We've all got things to cry about. Don't you think I could drown the world with tears if I started on my own woes?”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child

“What are you thinking, my love, my darling?'
'About you. I was wondering if you could make me happy. It would be fearfully difficult.'
'I'm fearfully clever, and I love you fearfully much.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child

“I do wish you could be happy. If I thought you could be happy I could simply cease to exist with a sigh of joy.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child

“Love can end. That's just one of the horrors of human life.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child

“There was a kind of sleeping or half-sleeping which I sometimes tried to achieve (especially at weekends) when I lay like a floating turtle, just breaking the surface of consciousness, aware and yet not self-aware, not yet tormented by being a particular person.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child

“Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child

“But people have their own troubles and tend to forget. One is not all that interesting. Even Hitler is being forgotten at last.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child: A Novel

“What do you want for Christmas?'
'A loaded revolver.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child

“Of course it seems ridiculous now, it seems stupid, to have suffered so much because of something so accidental and sort of frail which didn't have to happen and so very nearly didn't, and of course guilt is irrational, that was partly what made me think it would all vanish. But the irrationality is of the essence, it goes all the way through, it isn't any sort of fulcrum or escape route, it's the lot - I was destined to suffer stupidly, my mother suffered stupidly, my father suffered stupidly (...), it's what we were made for.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child

“There are no miracles, no redemptions, no moments of healing, no transfiguring changes in one's relation to the past. There is nothing but accepting the beastliness and defending oneself. When I was a little child I believed that Christ died for my sins. That was magic all right. He suffered and then somehow everything was made well. And nothing can be more consoling than that, to think that suffering can blot out sin, can really erase it completely, and that there is no death at the end of it all. Not only that, but there is no damage done on the way either, since every little thing can be changed and washed, everything can be saved, everything, what a marvellous myth, and they teach it to little defenceless children, and what a bloody awful lie, this denial of causation and death, this changing of death into a fairytale of constructive suffering! Who minds suffering if there's no death and the past can be altered? One might even want to suffer if it could automatically wipe out one's crimes. Whoopee. Only it ain't so.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child

“There may be no God, but there's decency and - and there's truth and trying to stay there, I mean to stay in it, in its sort of light, and trying to do a good thing and to hold onto what you know to be a good thing even if it seems stupid when you come to do it.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child

“We're all sinners. We all hurt each other just by existing.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child

“How could I so love someone whom I could never see or know, the person indeed who was of all the farthest from me, the most ineluctably separated? What awful suffering, not yet felt, not yet revealed, would this involve? Was this the punishment, the expiation, the end, the dark hole into which I would finally disappear? Yet even then I knew that from myself I would not disappear. I would go on indestructibly, day after day, week after week, year after year, and I would not break down and no one would ever hear me scream. That was the worst of it. And with this worst was interwoven the fact and miracle of love with all its gentleness and its vision and its pure joy.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child

“Perhaps 'love' had always been for me an ignis fatuus.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child

“How strange that behind a smiling chattering mask one may rehearse in the utmost detail pictures and conversations which constitute torture, that behind that mask one may weep, one may howl.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child

“We did not exist all that much. We could suffer like mad all the same. Something was there, a wounded complex of resentment and anxiety and pain, something half crushed, something swallowed, not yet digested, and still screaming.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child

“Well, everything's nicer when you can think about Christmas.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child

“You're miserable by yourself, you just mope. Don't you, don't you?'
'I enjoy misery and moping.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child

“I liked to live in other people's worlds and have none of my own.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child

“Christ was always purveyed to me by people who clearly regarded me not only as a delinquent but as an object of pity. There is an attitude of complacent do-gooding condescension which even decent people cannot conceal and even a small child can recognize. Their religion seemed to me over-lit, over-simple, covertly threatening. There was nowhere to hide. We roared out 'choruses' about sin and redemption which reduced the hugest theological dogmas to the size of a parlour trick. I rejected the theology but was defenceless against the guilt which was so fruitlessly beaten into me. The mood was brisk and impatient. Either you were saved by the blood of the Lamb or else you were for it, a black and white matter of breath-taking rewards or whipping. The efficacious Saviour almost figured to me as a sort of agent provocateur. Again and again the trick failed to work, the briskness turned to severity and the jollity ended in tears. In so far as there were mysteries and depths in my life I kept them secret from Christ and his soldiery. I was more moved by animals than I was by Jesus. One of the porters had a dog, and this dog once, as I sat beside him on the ground, touched my arm with his paw. This gentle gesture has stayed with me forever. And I remember stroking a guinea pig at school and feeling such a piercing strange pain, the realization that happiness existed, but was denied to me.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child

“I was brimming with anger and hatred. I hated, not society, puny sociologists' abstraction, I hated the universe. I wanted to cause it pain in return for the pain it caused me.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child

“How rarely can happiness be really innocent and not triumphant, not an insult to the deprived. How offensive it can be, the natural instinctive showing off of decent happy people.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child