And now in her deep heart an even sharper pain was stirring, a pain which would stay with her always.
Even as I write these words, which should be lucid and filled with glowing colour, I feel the very darkness of my own personality invading my pen. Only perhaps in the ink of this darkness can this writing properly be written? It is not really possible to write like an angel, though some of our near-gods by heaven-inspired trickery sometimes seem to do it.
No one, thank God, has attempted to befriend me.
Why did I ever leave them, what was I fleeing from? What spoilt scene that I could not then endure?
How little perhaps can words convey except in the hands of a genius.
It was too late to go back. There was a hand which could never, in grace and healing, be laid upon him now.
Eros and Thanatos: a false pair and a true pair.
But I have, I suppose, become through the power of love, awful, relentless.
I am going mad, she thought, I am in some sort of silent raging grief of which I shall die, everything has gone.
Could one think so intensely of someone and not be visited?
I will not attempt to describe how I got through the next few days. There are desolations of the spirit which can only be hinted at. I sat there huge-eyed in the wreck of myself.
Sentimentally and in the soul it went on for ages, it still goes on, it goes on and on.
This is the fundamental wisdom that suffuses Iris Murdoch’s fiction from Under the Net onward. True virtue, true goodness, true love flow from respect for the strangeness and the mystery of other people and the world that surrounds us. They flow from the refusal to inflict our own designs on them, to deny their innate elusiveness, their impenetrable quiddity.
I know that human life is horrible. I know that it is utterly unlike art. I have no religion except my own task of being. Conventional religions are dream stuff. Always a world of fear and horror lies but a millimetre away. Any man, even the greatest, can be broken in a moment and has no refuge. Any theory which denies this is a lie.
I’m terribly in love with you. But please don’t worry about it.
He felt indestructible because destroyed.
True politics is simply the drying of tears and the endless fight for freedom. Without freedom there is no art and no truth. I revere great artists and the men who say no to tyrants.
A human being is a morass, a swamp, a jungle.
An ever-increasing family of tabbies, sprung from one enormous matriarch, sit about upon the counter and on the empty shelves, somnolent and contemplative, their amber eyes narrowed and winking in the sun, a reluctant slit of liquid in an expanse of hot fur.
I’ve thought about nothing else but you.