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.
I’ve felt so sad for years about you. My love for you has always had a sad face.
The absence of the loved person is so absolute.
He had lived throughout upon magic, upon romantic love in its fullest sense, and this magic, now that she was gone, seemed sometimes likely to kill him.
She had loved him, she thought now, because, just at that time, she had had to have something else, someone else, to love, a private place for wounded love to go. But that had been, as she had then suspected and now knew, a device, a dream.
It was not a very pleasant face: heavy, perceptibly Jewish, and dour, with just a hint of insolence.