The Green Knight Quotes

“She felt intense disappointment, even a kind of guilt, as if she had missed something, perhaps forever. He had been there, she could have spoken to him. Could she call out now, cry his name? It was impossible.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Don't tease me. Everything wounds me now except perfect kindness.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“We shall meet, but as strangers. It is the end of an era. A whole part of my life is torn away.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“She thought, this is the end of happiness, darkness begins here.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“And now in her deep heart an even sharper pain was stirring, a pain which would stay with her always.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“And he thought, I shall go on blindly and secretly jumbling all these things together and making no sense of them as long as I live. Maybe every human creature carries some such inescapable burden. That is being human. A very weird affair.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Perhaps this 'dead' feeling was also brought on by an intensification of her old secret sorrow. Perhaps one day this sorrow might end. But she did not think it would end or see how it could end.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“I must think of him as vanished utterly and gone forever.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Look Moy, see the chimneys, they've lit all the fires, they must have known we were going to try to drown ourselves. And Anax is running on ahead to bring the news.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Looking toward the Polish Rider she met his calm tender gentle thoughtful gaze. She thought, what he sees is the face of death. He sees the silence of the valley, its emptiness, its innocence — and beyond it the hideous field of war on which he will die. And his poor horse will die too. He is courage, he is love, he loves what is good, and will die for it, his body will be trampled by horses' hooves, and no one will know his grave. She thought, he is so beautiful, he has the beauty of goodness.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“She thought, I shall die of misery and pain.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“I must return to my freedom which I now realise is something so essential that it makes my love for you seem like death.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“But oh — time has become such a torture, a slow torture. One tries to capture a piece of time that lies ahead and is full of light . . . but thinking about that just makes this awful black time even blacker.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“A great sword pierced Sefton's heart. She too had loved Lucas with her own kind of deep secret love, and it seemed to her in this moment that, if he had asked her, she would have gone with him anywhere.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Deep, deepest inside his wounded heart. he felt the new pain, the pain which would now travel with him always.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“I am going mad, she thought, I am in some sort of silent raging grief of which I shall die, everything has gone.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Yet the love is there, the love is there — only it's as if it's so wounded it has curled up and gone into a black hole.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“All that had seemed impossible, too late, a dream, had suddenly become possible, even natural and inevitable.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“These words had impressed Clement deeply, inscribed upon his heart.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“The presence of so many things which ought to have delighted her and been her friends brought home to Moy how little delight she could now feel and how alienated she now was from all the beings to which she had once felt so close.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“She dreamt she saw the Polish Rider passing slowly by and he was weeping and she called out to him, but he turned his head away. She dreamt that she was drowning in the pool of tears.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Those were the tortures of the night. The tortures of the day consisted in pretending to eat, pretending to play, pretending to be happy, passing the hours, enduring the sympathetic looks and the loving remarks.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Beyond her declaration of love she could not see. But as she rehearsed the intensity of her passion she thought that he must, when the time came, respond. The desire to, at the right time, tell him became, as the years moved forward toward that time, increasingly painful, like a poisoned wound that must heal itself by breaking open. She now thought in anguish of the times, the recent times, when she could have told him, and had been afraid to, and had clumsily withdrawn, when she could have attracted him and drawn his attention to her. When she had watched over him when he was sleeping in the sedan-chair and could have wakened him with a kiss. If only she had let him know, then she could more easily have borne his not preferring her. He was ready to fall in love — and if he had known — he must have loved her — if he had known how much she loved him. The pain of this loss burnt her in every waking moment, that awful 'if only'. She had lost him, and lost him through her own fault. There were no more pleasures now in life.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Moy felt something snap inside her as if her heart had snapped. The heart-string, she thought — what is the heart-string?”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Well, it's such an adventure we shall talk about it forever!”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Moy thought, I shall make no more masks, something is over forever. Anyway, she thought, this time next year I shall probably be dead.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“(Writing about the Green Knight in long poem Sir Gawain and The Green Knight)
It seems safe to say, first, that the peom is not an allegory, in any simple sense of the term. Bercilak, as a supernatural creature tempting Gawain to sin, has elememts of a devil, as a genial host who leads Sir Gawain to self-knowledge, he is a friendly guide; and as a green man who dies in winter and is miraculously reborn, he has elements of a fertility deity. But he cannot be flatly equated with any of these figures without falisfyjng the complexity.”
― Denton Fox, Twentieth Century Interpretations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

“…a year passes quickly and changes its moods;
the end rarely matches the spirit it starts in...”
― Bernard O’Donoghue

“All ripens, then rots, that sprang in such hope.
So the year passes on through its series of yesterdays,
and winter comes round again, as nature demands,
ever the same.”
― Bernard O’Donoghue

“When you say the name of Khezr (or Khadir) in company you should always add the greeting "Salaam aliekum!" since he may be there - immortal and anonymous, engaged on some mysterious karmic errand. Perhaps he'll hint of his identity by wearing green, or by revealing knowledge of the occult and hidden. But he's something of a spy, and if you have no need to know he's unlikely to tell you. Still, one of his functions is to convince skeptics of the existence of the marvelous, to rescue those who are lost in deserts of doubt and dryness. So he's needed now more than ever, and surely still moves among us playing his great game.”
― Peter Lamborn Wilson, Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam