How could he ever sleep, in such a roar of silence, how could he forgo a conscious moment of the bliss of solitude? He stretched arms and legs to all points of the compass and fell asleep almost immed...
His mother was a good and fearful Lutheran, who gave away both time and money, visiting hospitals for the poor, organising bazaars and clothing collections. But she ate from Meissen porcelain with sil...
He hesitated. They were what stayed alive, when I’d been taught and examined everything else.Maud smiled then. Exactly. That’s it. What could survive our education.
He began to walk into the pottery, which had been the dairy. He knew enough about the evil-tempered to know that you had to walk away from them, or they couldn’t give up their wrath, even if they need...
Dorothy was in that state human beings passed through at the beginning of a love affair, in which they desire to say anything and everything to the beloved, to the alter ego, before they have learned...
Dorothy looked at everything as though it might vanish. The bright daily pottery, the spice-jars, the sweep of the staircase, the pigeons in the stable yard. What had been real was now like a thick fi...
Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. Falling in love, characteristically, combs the appearanc...
Ah, said Florence, grimly. A woman has to be extraordinary, she can’t just do things as though she had a right. You have to get better marks than the Senior Wrangler, and still you can’t have a degree...
You do not seem aware, for all of your knowledge of the great world I do not frequent, of the usual response which the productions of the Female Pen--let alone as in our case, the *hypothetick* produc...
You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.
There are things, also, that are memories as essential and structural as bones in toes and fingers.
The aspect of this transcendent reality upon which, both in terms of liberal morals, and of the art of the novel, Miss Murdoch lays most emphasis, is what she calls the ‘opacity of persons’.
She tells her love while half asleep, In the dark hours, With half-words whispered low: As Earth stirs in her winter sleep And puts out grass and flowers Despite the snow, ...
Olive thought she had forgotten what pain could be. She was a railway tunnel in which a battering train had come to a fiery halt. She was a burrow in which a creature had wedged itself and could go ne...
Maud considered. She said, 'In every age, there must be truths people can't fight - whether or not they want to, whether or not they will go on being truths in the future. We live in the truth of what...
It was hard for a man and a woman to be fiends with no under thought or glimpsed prospect of sex. They wanted to be friends. It was almost a matter of principle. She was as intelligent as any Fellow o...
Iron bars make a cage all right, and the more you look at them or reproduce them the more you know it’s a real cage.
Independent women must expect more of themselves, since neither men nor other more conventionally domesticated women will hope for anything, or expect any result other than utter failure.
But now, my dear, we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere.
An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.