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 was a thinking child, and worked this out. It hurt her, unlike most knowledge, which was strength and pleasure.
She thought human thoughts and stone thoughts. The latter were slow, patchily coloured, textured and extreme, both hot and cold. They did not translate into the English language, or into any other she...
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, ...
She sat beside him on the bench, and her presence troubled him. He was the atmosphere, or light, or scent she spread, as a boat is inside the drag of a whirlpool, as a bee is caught in the lasso of p...
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...
Julian expected to be full of love and lust, and consequently usually was. He had an inconvenient habit of watching himself from a distance, and wondering whether the love and lust were strained and f...
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.
He muttered to himself. Why bother. Why does this matter so much. What difference does it make to anything if I solve this blue and just start again. I could just sit down and drink wine. I could go a...
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...
Balzac's cynicism was always nevertheless romantic - such greed, such gusto. 'Le dégoût, c'est voir juste. Après la possession, l'amour voit juste chez les hommes.' Why should that be so? Why was disg...
An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
All these are true and none. The place is thereIs what we name it, and is not. It .
I have always believed I cd diagnose this state of which they regard as as inspired by one pair of black eyes or indifferent blue, one graceful attitude of body or mind, one female history of som...
Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading. I notice particular words. That sets me off.