A Severed Head Quotes

“I was now, all the time, unutterably tired as if simply keeping alive was a terrible effort.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“Your love for me does not exist in the real world. Yes, it is love, I do not deny it. But not every love has a course to run, smooth or otherwise, and this love has no course at all . . . But that is remote from love and remote from ordinary life. As real people we do not exist for each other.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“The trouble with people nowadays is they don't know how to do nothing.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“There is a time limit to how long a spirited young person can be kept in cold storage.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“Was it unpleasant?"

"I don't know," I said. "Everything is so unpleasant nowadays it's hard to tell.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“I could scarcely believe what I saw and I had the sense as in a nightmare of being involved in something both wildly improbable and relentlessly inevitable. This had to happen. Yet how could it have happened?”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“I said, "Your brother is in bed with my wife." I added, "I just took them up some wine in bed.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“We did really love each other . . . didn't we? Didn't we? In the name of that reality —
M.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“It was for me a moment of great peace. I did not know then that it was the last, the very last moment of peace, the end of the old innocent world, the final moment before I was plunged into the nightmare of which these ensuing pages tell the story.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart, was something I had not experienced with any other woman.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“I wanted consolation, I wanted love, I wanted, to save me, some colossal and powerful love such as I had never known before.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“I touched the Waterford glass with my finger: and in its ring I heard the echo of a voice saying You do not really want your wife back after all. I answered the voice in my heart: a bond of this kind is deeper and stronger than wanting or not wanting. Wherever I am in the world and whenever I am I shall always be Antonia.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“I shook myself out of these dreams. There were places where my thoughts must not go; and as I then reflected how few places were left where they could now go without incurring pain or guilt I decided that I needed some more whisky.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“You've got to see me, Martin. I'm to blame. I've never been quite and entirely myself with you. The situation didn't let me be. The untruthfulness infected everything. I must break out a little? Do you see at all?”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“Cambridge by moonlight was light blue and brownish black. There was no mist here and a great vault of clear stars hung over the city with an intent luxurious brilliance. It was the sort of night when one knows of other galaxies. My long shadow glided before me on the pavement. Although it was not yet eleven o'clock the place seemed empty and I moved through it like a mysterious and lonely harlequin in a painting: like an assassin.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“I lit another cigarette and wondered distantly how I would get through the day. It was a problem demanding some ingenuity.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“I could not see other human beings at present.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“It had all been quite uncannily painless. I was left with a sense of not having suffered enough. Only sometimes in dreams did I experience certain horrors, glimpses of punishment which would perhaps yet find its hour.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“I have never lived in Ireland, though I retain a sentimental sense of connexion with that poor bitch of a country.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“To describe one's character is difficult and not necessarily illuminating. The story which follows will reveal, whether I will or no, what sort of person I am.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“Understanding was out of the question; and indeed how passionately, just then, I did not want to be understood.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“We'll see you through, Martin," said Antonia . . . "So do not be guilty or worried, darling Martin."

"I won't be guilty or worried, I'll be raving mad," I said. "I don't want you to see me through. I want to be left alone by both of you at long last.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“It occurred to me as scandalous that Palmer and Antonia, after the scene in which I had taken part in the drawing-room, should have gone out to the opera. Antonia ought to have been waiting for me to come back. I resented this indifference to the tempo of my own drama.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“You are heroic, Mr. Lynch-Gibbon. The knight of infinite humiliation. One does not know whether to kiss your feet or to recommend that you have a good analysis." She said it as one might say "a good thrashing.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“What I really wanted just then was to put Georgie in cold storage. It is unfortunate that other human beings cannot be conveniently immobilized.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“I was perhaps moreover a little the dupe of that illusion of lovers that the beloved object must, somehow, respond, that an extremity of love not only merits but compels some return.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“With a fluency that amazed me lies and treachery streamed from my lips. I was in extreme pain.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“I tried to think these thoughts but they remained intolerably abstract, while a pain in my body told me what was real.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head