Henry and Cato Quotes

“One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“His heart ached in such a familiar way, and the very familiarity of it pained him.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“You see, nobody cares about me except you. You don't know what that's like. You've always had people who cared. You've always had people. I've never had anybody. No wonder I feel frustrated.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“I know girls aren't supposed to tell, but I've got to tell—just in case you should fail to love me because you never knew how much I loved you. I want not to have to say later—I wish I'd told him.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“Tell her I was young once and star-bright
Who am now invisible . . .”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“I was born to be nothing and to have nothing.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“I did love her in a way, but it was under the sign of doom.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“I've somehow run myself into hell. There must be many entrances.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“I want you to be able to see me, and as my love for you is so much of me (all of me, making me more than myself) then you must see that too.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“I lead a worthless life, he thought, I live in unreality and untruth. If only there could be total change, regeneration, escape. If only I could run and run and get back to the people, back to where real wholesome, ordinary life is being lived. I have given myself a mean role and cannot now stop enacting it. Oh if only I could get out! But even as he thought these familiar thoughts he knew: unreality is my reality, untruth is my truth, I am too old now and I have no other way.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“And suffering we know breeds images, it breeds the most beautiful images of all.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“I don't like you, I love you. You're a portent for me, a sign. I've always lived by signs.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“You don't know what it's like to be me, you don't know what it's like to be all tattered and destroyed inside.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“Desperate for help, living his life now as a hideous dream, he had told nobody.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“And so my life has become tiny and mean and incomplete and I must begin it again without comfort and without magic.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“Here I am, after all, welcome home, I'm yours. To which Henry replied: When I wanted you you were not mine, when I needed you you rejected me. Why should I cherish you now?”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“You're doing your thing, why can't I do my thing? I must be me even if I suffer for it.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“I can't tell you—oh I can't tell you—how awful—how sort of unlivable—everything is now—like a great black wall in front of me—Something's got to smash.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“And she wondered now how she could go on existing through the successive moments of her life.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“I'm not a lucky person who makes radiant decisions which are obviously right.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“One can't whistle up happiness. It's a gift of nature and I haven't got it.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“That love all belonged to the elapsed moment.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“And she looked at her life and seemed to understand it and to grieve over it as if it were already over.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“You don't understand what it's like when things are terrible in your mind.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“He had always thought of himself as a muddler, a sufferer, a victim.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“The new world, he thought, the new life, and how sad it is. I suppose I should be congratulating myself, it may even be that later I shall look back on this as heaven.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“Henry's joy left him abruptly and he began anxiously to think about himself.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“Everyone says how wonderful it is to be young. I've never seen it.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“Terrible sadness, dread, an agonizing desire for happiness swelled in his heart.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“But I've had such a rotten life. People like me are a problem.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato