The Black Prince Quotes

“Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“The division of one day from the next must be one of the most profound peculiarities of life on this planet. We are not condemned to sustained flights of being, but are constantly refreshed by little holidays from ourselves. We are intermittent creatures, always falling to little ends and rising to new beginnings. Our soon-tired consciousness is meted out in chapters, and that the world will look quite different tomorrow is, both for our comfort and our discomfort, usually true. How marvelously too night matches sleep, sweet image of it, so nearly apportioned to our need. Angels must wonder at these beings who fall so regularly out of awareness into a fantasm-infested dark. How our frail identities survive these chasms no philosopher has ever been able to explain.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“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

“I have nobody in the world. I'll kill myself. That's best. Everyone will say, It's for the best that she killed herself, she's better off dead . . . I hate myself so much I could spend hours and hours just screaming with hatred and with the pain of it, oh the pain of it . . .”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Once in an endless meadow, just able to peer through the tawny haze of the grass tops, the child who was myself had watched a young fox catching mice, an elegant newly minted fox, straight from the hand of God, brilliantly ruddy, with black stockings and a white-tipped brush. The fox heard and turned. I saw its intense vivid mask, its liquid amber eyes. Then it was gone. An image of such beauty and such mysterious sense. The child wept and knew himself an artist.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Most friendships are a sort of frozen and undeveloping semi-hostility.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Love generates, or rather reveals, something which may be called absolute charm. In the beloved nothing is gauche. Every move of the head, every tone of the voice, every laugh or grunt or cough or twitch of the nose is as valuable and revealing as a glimpse of paradise.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Only take someone's hand in a certain way, even look into their eyes in a certain way, and the world is changed forever.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“An experience is richest not talked of.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“I tried deep breathing, but seemed to lose contact with myself between each breath, so that the next one was always an emergency. I began to feel faint.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“She was a spoiler, a needler, an underminer, a diminisher, simply by instinct.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Oh my life is so awful, it's just so awful to be me, you don't know what it's like waking every morning and finding the whole horror of being yourself still there.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Let me sleep at last. I've had misery enough in my life. You said there was nowhere to go to. There is death to go to. I've had misery enough in my life.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“It was not simply that I frenziedly desired what I could not have. That was but a blunt and unrefined kind of suffering. I was condemned to be with her even in her very rejection of me. And how long and how slow and how long-drawn-out that rejection would be. Still temptation would follow where she was. Endlessly she would give herself to others taking me with her. Like an obscene puny familiar I would sit in the corners of bedrooms where she kissed and loved. She would make consort with my foes, she would adore those that mocked me, she would drink contempt for me from alien lips. And all the time my very soul would travel with her, invisible and crying soundlessly with pain.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“The division of one day from the next must be one of the most profound peculiarities of life on this planet. It is, on the whole, a merciful arrangement. We are not condemned to sustained flights of being, but are constantly refreshed by little holidays from ourselves.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“What the cold light showed me was that my situation was simply unlivable. I wanted, with a desire greater than any desire which I had ever conceived could exist without instantly killing its owner by spontaneous combustion, something which I simply could not have.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“All chances of happiness are gone from me. Just being with myself is hell all the time anyway.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“You've obviously never been in love."

"I have actually. And awfully. And—always—without hope—I've never had my love reciprocated ever.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“But I live, I live, with an absolutely continuous sense of failure. I am always defeated, always.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“I've thought about nothing else but you.”
― 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 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 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 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

“Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Those who occasion loss of dignity are hard to forgive.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“There are no spare unrecorded encapsulated moments in which we can behave 'anyhow' and then expect to resume life where we left off.”
― 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