The Black Prince Quotes

“I've been so unhappy for years, so unhappy . . . I don't understand how a human being can be so unhappy all the time and still be alive.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“The world is perhaps ultimately to be defined as a place of suffering. Man is a suffering animal, subject to ceaseless anxiety and pain and fear.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“I need love, I've never felt more in need of it than now. I feel so terribly terribly unhappy.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Only sometimes at night when I think that you live now and are somewhere, I shed tears.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“I have seen much of human beings over a long period, and I have learnt how little good to expect from them.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“I felt so ashamed with them because everything in their life was going so well and they were so sort of successful. I couldn't talk about what I wanted with them and they were always in a hurry.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“It's not my fault! It can't make any difference, can it?"

"You understand nothing. You are a destroyer, a black spiteful destroyer. You are the sort of person who goes around in a dream smashing things . . . You aren't really here at all.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“I am sorry that our friendship, or whatever name one may give to the obsessive relationship which has bound us together for so many years, should end in this way. This is not the place to utter its elegy.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Art is not cosy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“There are moments when, if one rejects the simple and obvious promptings of duty, one finds oneself in a labyrinth of complexities of some quite new kind.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“One can't stop people from killing themselves if they're determined to. It may even be wrong to do so.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Perhaps in the end the suffering is all, it's all contained in the suffering. The final atoms of it all are simply pain.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“The morning brought the crisis of my life. But it was not anything that I could have conceived of in my wildest imaginings.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“I believe that unfulfilled frustrated people probably spend a lot of their lives in pure fantasy-dreaming. This can I am sure be a great source of consolation though not always harmless.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“But there are times of suffering which remain in our lives like black absolutes and are not blotted out. Fortunate are those for whom these black stars shed some sort of light.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“(The false god punishes, the true god slays.)”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Here memory was simply a cold cloud to be shuddered at.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“It was a voyage into the absurd.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“I know her by intuition as if she were inside my head.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“I've never had any luck, Brad. I don't even hope for any any more.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Perhaps the reality is in the suffering. But it can't be. Love promises happiness. Art promises happiness. Yet it isn't exactly a promise . . .”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Happiness must exist. It can't all be made of pain. But what is happiness made of?”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“I felt at times, it is hard to describe this, almost mad with guilt, with a sort of general guilt about my whole life.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Anyway people never fall in love suddenly like that except in novels.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“That this world is a place of horror must affect every serious artist and thinker, darkening his reflection, ruining his system, sometimes actually driving him mad. Any seriousness avoids this fact at its peril, and the great ones who have seemed to neglect it have only done so in appearance.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“But there can be intuitions even here of a more sublime agony.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“We cannot really love the dead. We love a fantasm that secretly consoles. What love sometimes mistakes for death is a kind of intense suffering, a pain that can be endured and absorbed. But the idea of a real ending, that cannot be envisaged . . . Indeed, in the language of love the concept of an ending is devoid of sense. (So we must go beyond love or utterly change it.)”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Oh Christ, if I could only have some happiness.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“I had been confronted (at last) with a sizeable ordeal labelled with my name. This was not something to be wasted.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“There are people who occasion in one, as it seems automatically, obsessive egoistic anxiety and preoccupying resentment. When confronted with such people one should if possible run: or else deaden the mind to them. (Or behave in some 'saintly' manner not here relevant.)”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince