Iris Murdoch Love Quotes

Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.

What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.

Art and morality are, with certain provisos…one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

I know how much you grieve over those who are under your care: those you try to help and fail, those you cannot help. Have faith in God and remember that He will is His own way and in His own time complete what we so poorly attempt. Often we do not achieve for others the good that we intend but achieve something, something that goes on from our effort. Good is an overflow. Where we generously and sincerely intend it, we are engaged in a work of creation which may be mysterious even to ourselves - and because it is mysterious we may be afraid of it. But this should not make us draw back. God can always show us, if we will, a higher and a better way; and we can only learn to love by loving. Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected but made perfect. The way is always forward, never back.

let us not waste love, it is rare enough

Love doesn't think like that. All right, it's blind as a bat--' 'Bats have radar. Yours doesn't seem to be working.

(I think I fell in love with you when you were shouting at Romeo and Juliet, 'Don't touch each other!')

Love is the Extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real

The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life's most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in amazement at being so valued. The past is searched for the first signs and each one is in haste to declare all that he is so that no part of his being escapes the hallowing touch.

We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.

I had deluded myself throughout by the idea of reviving a secret love which did not exist at all.

When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it. But then what one achieves is no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of co-existence; and this too is one of the guises of love.

This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart...

Only take someone's hand in a certain way, even look into their eyes in a certain way, and the world is changed forever.

And now she had run into an emptiness more final than any words of rejection. He was gone and would make himself a stranger to her for ever.

He felt misery, loneliness, a terrible need for love.

Love generates, or rather reveals, something which may be called absolute charm. In the beloved nothing is gauche. Every move of the head, every tone of the voice, every laugh or grunt or cough or twitch of the nose is as valuable and revealing as a glimpse of paradise.

I need love, I've never felt more in need of it than now. I feel so terribly terribly unhappy.

A childhood hatred, like a childhood love, can last a lifetime.

One can be too ingenious in trying to search out the truth. Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face. Of course this is a love story.

A love without reservation ought to be a life force compelling the world into order and beauty. But that love can be so strong and yet so entirely powerless is what breaks the heart.

It is in the capacity to love, that is to SEE, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists. The freedom which is a proper human goal is the freedom from fantasy, that is the realism of compassion. What I have called fantasy, the proliferation of blinding self-centered aims and images, is itself a powerful system of energy, and most of what is often called 'will' or 'willing' belongs to this system. What counteracts the system is attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love.

You know what. You've killed me and sent me to hell, and you must descend to the underworld to find me and make me live again. If you don't come for me, I'll become a demon and drag you down into the dark.

You've obviously never been in love." "I have actually. And awfully. And—always—without hope—I've never had my love reciprocated ever.

I've thought about nothing else but you.

Somehow I've always wanted the ones that didn't want me. I'm the absolute queen bee of unrequited love.

I am sorry," said Monty. "I cannot respond to you in any way. I am just not sufficiently interested in anything you have to say.

I'm the absolute queen bee of unrequited love.

I'll never be happy, how can you love me, I'm awful, I'm covered with spiders, I'm doomed.

He was glad that he had expressed to her, however blunderingly, what he felt. He was glad that he had held her hand.

To say we were 'in love', that vague weakened phrase, cannot express it. We loved each other, we lived in each other, through each other, by each other. We were each other. Why was it such pure unadulterated pain?

Events stream past us like these crowds and the face of each is seen only for a minute. What is urgent is not urgent for ever but only ephemerally. All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, like itself, are made up of moments which pass and become nothing. Yet through this shaft of nothings we drive onward with that miraculous vitality that creates our precarious habitations in the past and the future. So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.

I crave for love, everybody does . . . and I've never had a bloody crumb of it—and I've given so much love to people—I can really love people, I can, I let them walk over me—but nobody's ever loved me.

But it was just luck really if the girls survived. You're like a man firing a machine gun into a supermarket who happens not to become a murderer.

Now, when she felt so deeply connected to him, they were finally estranged.

Your love for me does not exist in the real world. Yes, it is love, I do not deny it. But not every love has a course to run, smooth or otherwise, and this love has no course at all . . . But that is remote from love and remote from ordinary life. As real people we do not exist for each other.

Your coldness has ruined my life. All right, you didn't mean it, all right I was a schoolgirl, but you could have been kinder to someone who said they loved you, you could have been gentle and grateful.

Amo amas amat amamus amatis amant amavi amavisti amavit amavimus amavistis amaverunt amavero amaveris amaverit… Everything was love. Everything will be love. Everything has been love. Everything would be love. Everything would have been love. Ah, that was it, the truth at last. Everything would have been love. The huge eye, which had become an immense sphere, was gently breathing, only it was not an eye nor a sphere but a great wonderful animal covered in little waving legs like hairs, waving oh so gently as if they were under water. All shall be well and all shall be well said the ocean. So the place of reconciliation existed after all, not like a little knot hole in a cupboard but flowing everywhere and being everything. I had only to will it and it would be, for spirit is omnipotent only I never knew it, like being able to walk on the air. I could forgive. I could be forgiven. I could forgive. Perhaps that was the whole of it after all. Perhaps being forgiven was just forgiving only no one had ever told me. There was nothing else needful. Just to forgive. Forgiving equals being forgiven, the secret of the universe, do not whatever you do forget it. The past was folded up and in the twinkling of an eye everything had been changed and made beautiful and good.

What the cold light showed me was that my situation was simply unlivable. I wanted, with a desire greater than any desire which I had ever conceived could exist without instantly killing its owner by spontaneous combustion, something which I simply could not have.

Love is no respecter of ages, everyone knows that.

I'm sorry I was awful. I'm so full of terrors.

But she felt that she had to see him or she would die.

I know girls aren't supposed to tell, but I've got to tell—just in case you should fail to love me because you never knew how much I loved you. I want not to have to say later—I wish I'd told him.

You don't respect me," said Dora, her voice trembling. "Of course I don't respect you," said Paul. "Have I any reason to? I'm in love with you, unfortunately, that's all." "Well, it's unfortunate for me too," said Dora, starting to cry.

We may love our chains and our stripes too.

Well, we all three loved and comforted each other. We were poorish and lonely and awkward together.

Sartre turns love into a ‘battle between two hypnotists in a closed room’.

You are preserving your dignity by refusing to show your feelings. But there are moments when love ought to be undignified, extravagant, even violent.

To find a person inexhaustible is simply the definition of love.

I was not, except in some very broken-down sense of that ambiguous term, a love child. I was a word child.

We did really love each other . . . didn't we? Didn't we? In the name of that reality — M.

He dreamt...he was a huge white egg floating in the sea of turquoise blue, and he was everything that there was.

No! I can't leave him, I'm bound to him, I'm made of him, I am him!

Oh what an ill fate it was that has made me love that man.

Well, you won't abandon me, will you." "Don't be silly, Ludens, you are buckled to my heart.

You're as wonderful as I expected, and I worship you for it.

And this great love makes you both ruthless.

A woman in love is a great spiritual force.

Could one think so intensely of someone and not be visited?

Only the house was still desolate and the day had a livid ruined atmosphere, time had been damaged in some deep way, like on a day of bereavement or frightful national disaster.

No good would come of all these fine intentions.

I love you. I saw you that night in the garden, and I knew you were magic like in dreams.

He's had a bloody awful childhood. Like I had. Those things get passed on and on.

I saw . . . what I've really know all along, that you are my truth. For me you are the way the truth and the life. Only here can I be totally myself.

. . . darkness was staining all the intricate channels of what had once seemed so perfect.

Maybe there are times when one should welcome defeat, tell it to come right in and sit down.

How can we not be dooms to each other?

And I thought, rolling my head to and fro between my hands in anguish, oh if only it could have worked somehow for us two.

I did love her in a way, but it was under the sign of doom.

Mercifully one forgets one's love affairs as one forgets one's dreams.

I might say too that you are the person who ought to help me, since you do bear some responsibility for having awakened in me such an immense, such a truly monstrous degree of love.

The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak. You dedicate yourself passionately to something, to a project, to people, to a family, you think of nothing else for weeks and months, then suddenly it's over, it's perpetual destruction, perpetual divorce, perpetual adieu. It's like éternel retour, it's a koan. It's like falling in love and being smashed over and over again.’ 'You do, then, fall in love.’ 'Only with fictions, I love players, but actors are so ephemeral. And then there’s waiting for the perfect part, and being offered it the day after you've committed yourself to something utterly rotten. The remorse, and the envy and the jealousy. An old actor told me if I wanted to stay in the trade I had better kill off envy and jealousy at the start.

I am out of the saga, he thought. He had a heavy sense of being left in total isolation; everyone had withdrawn from him and the person who could most have helped him was pre-empted by another.

There's no point in talking it over. It would only make things worse. There's nothing to say. I just love you. That's all of it." "That's half of it," said Ducane. "Possibly over dinner I might tell you the other half.

It was not simply that I frenziedly desired what I could not have. That was but a blunt and unrefined kind of suffering. I was condemned to be with her even in her very rejection of me. And how long and how slow and how long-drawn-out that rejection would be. Still temptation would follow where she was. Endlessly she would give herself to others taking me with her. Like an obscene puny familiar I would sit in the corners of bedrooms where she kissed and loved. She would make consort with my foes, she would adore those that mocked me, she would drink contempt for me from alien lips. And all the time my very soul would travel with her, invisible and crying soundlessly with pain.

Oh God, that conversation last night or this morning or whenever that devil-ridden scrap of nightmare had been. How could two rational beings go on and on simply saying the same awful things to each other week after week, month after month?

But whatever she was I loved her and was committed to her and had always been, here and out beyond the stars, those stars behind stars behind stars which I had seen that night when I lay on the rocks and the golden sky slowly turned the universe inside out.

Happy love undoes the self and makes the world visible. Unhappy love is, or can be, a revelation of pure suffering.

Love can end. That's just one of the horrors of human life.

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.

I wanted consolation, I wanted love, I wanted, to save me, some colossal and powerful love such as I had never known before.

It had indeed been a failure of faith and courage not to wander on through the forest, not to search faithfully for his true mate, not to believe and endure.

Happiness. What's that? I don't know. How can one be happy when one loves a demon?

He was attentive but impersonal, and esteemed rather than loved.

Of course I love Arnold, but I can hate him too, and it can go along with love that one never forgives certain things.

How could it be that I had actually kissed her cheek without enveloping her, without becoming her? How could I at that moment have refrained from kneeling at her feet and howling?

I am really in love and it's a terrible experience.

I'm terribly in love with you. But please don't worry about it.

I'm totally unworthy of this love which you are offering to me.

I know her by intuition as if she were inside my head.

Perhaps the reality is in the suffering. But it can't be. Love promises happiness. Art promises happiness. Yet it isn't exactly a promise . . .

Anyway people never fall in love suddenly like that except in novels.

Since she had been looking after him she had felt bound to him by a strange silent love.

I'm falling in love with you again, most terribly in love." "I've never been out of love with you, never for a second.

Today we will read love poetry. You shall read aloud to me and we will weep together.

It is unfortunately for us both also the truth that I love you and only you utterly and permanently and to distraction.

It was all very simple. I just loved her. I couldn't stop. I haven't stopped. Oh God.

I ceased some time ago to believe in goodness.

You daren't think, so you live in a dream.

You can't go through the looking-glass without cutting yourself.

I feel I'm living on pain, riding on it, like a sea.

With the characteristic cunning of true love, she was already manipulating the future.

. . . a meadow which David had known before the coming of the motorway, where he had searched for mushrooms in previous autumns, in lost quiet golden hazes.

How irrevocably spoilt, down to its minutest detail, his world was now. Even the countryside was spoilt, the animals, the birds, the flowers. There was nowhere to run to.

. . . none of these things had really got to happen at all, since she could prevent them. The power of pure destruction was still hers. She could still make it death or glory.

I suddenly feel . . . as if he might never come. There are 'nevers' in people's lives. People go away, people die, it does happen —

Good-bye to the past, with its mysteries which would never be fully unfolded.

Getting through time was rather the problem. The cry of 'Help me!' — but there was no one there.

Blaise has always lived in a dream world." "We all live in dream worlds," said Monty.

It is unjust, it is so unjust, was her thought. I have never been recognized as myself.

Oh if only only only we could be happy and ordinary like other people.

He could go back and take her in his arms. If only he knew how to do this. But they had lost the language of their affections, they had lost the style.

Are we not somehow compelled by love? I shall not let one day pass without giving you the assurance of mine. Surely there is a future for us together. I am yours yours yours.

It's terrible that one doesn't love people forever.

The had met at a party. Falling in love surprised them both.

Of course one never knows about other people's loves, and I would certainly never know about James's.

Who is one's first love? Who indeed.

Yes of course I was in love with my own youth. Aunt Estelle? Not really. Who is one's first love?

I've felt so sad for years about you. My love for you has always had a sad face.

Lovely country, isn't it. Do you know this part of the world?" "No." He said, suddenly stretching out his hands, "Oh, the sea, the sea—it's so wonderful.

He simply would not have married anybody whom he loved in that rather simple mediocre sort of way.

Perhaps the crime was that of letting himself be loved so much more than he loved.

I don't like you, I love you. You're a portent for me, a sign. I've always lived by signs.

but it was love in an inferno: that terrible relentless withholding of forgiveness.

If only he could be loved by somebody new.

I want you to be able to see me, and as my love for you is so much of me (all of me, making me more than myself) then you must see that too.

I accused Hartley of being a 'fantasist', or perhaps that was Titus's word, but what a 'fantasist' I have been myself. I was the dreamer, I the magician. How much, I see as I look back, I read into it all, reading my own dream text and not looking at the reality. Hartley had been right when she said of our love that it was not part of the real world. It had no place.

The same virtues, in the end, the same virtue (love), are required throughout, and fantasy (self) can prevent us from seeing a blade of grass just as it can prevent us from seeing another person. An increasing awareness of 'goods' and the attempt (usually only partially successful) to attend to them purely, without self, brings with it an increasing awareness of the unity and interdependence of the moral world. One-seeking intelligence is the image of faith.

Misery had certainly given her energy, a sense of identity, a powerful questing will. It was even impressive. His part however was to be lucid and disappointing and cold. The least tenderness or excitement, the least foothold in his heart, and he and she would both be in danger.

What are you thinking, my love, my darling?' 'About you. I was wondering if you could make me happy. It would be fearfully difficult.' 'I'm fearfully clever, and I love you fearfully much.

He said, 'Forgive me for being a liar and a fool and an utterly worthless man.' Louise replied, 'I love you.' He took her in his arms for a moment and they held each other with closed eyes.

Mary did not believe in analysing herself, and she had left vague the notion that sometimes came to her that this anxious unfulfilled sort of loving was the only kind of which she was capable.

The idea of killing himself was now more real to him than it had ever been, and he understood for the first time how it is that men can prefer extinction to the continuation of agonizing mental pain. He simply must somehow stop himself from suffering in this way. A guilt about Sophie roved sharply inside him and a cinematograph in his head re-enacted and re-enacted certain scenes. He must, he thought, now somehow switch himself off or else move on into some new and even more awful mode of being.

This talk of love means very little. Love is not a feeling. It can be tested. Love is action, it is silence. It's not the emotional straining and scheming for possession that you used to think it was.

I saw her simplicity, her ignorance, her childish unkindness, her unpretty anxious little face. She was not beautiful or brilliantly clever. How false it is to say that love is blind. I could even judge her, I could even condemn her, I could even, in some possible galactic loop of thought, make her suffer.

And all the time my very soul would travel with her, invisible and crying soundlessly with pain. I had acquired a dimension of suffering which would poison and devour my whole being, as far as I could see, forever.

She could not bear the tenderness which a dog would evoke, she did not want the pain of another love. She knew how very much, how desperately, she would love her dog; and dogs are vulnerable and short-lived and die.

She had never been filled with her love like a calm brimming vessel. She had rather suffered it, as a tree might suffer a cold wind, and the image of a coldness was somehow mingled with her memories of marital love.

But the spark vanished, there was no longed-for recognition, no dawning sign of recovery. The love she had learnt in tending him was an enclosed love, muted and maimed, already mourning. They would never communicate now.

The lover readily imagines that he and his mistress are one. He feels he has love enough for both and that his loving will can swathe the two of them together like twin nuts in a shell. But what one loves is, after all, another human being, a person with other interests, other pains, in whose world one is oneself an object among others.

She was her death now, that death which she had so much striven to emulate in life, which she had studied and practised and loved. She had succeeded, and death and she had converged into a single point. Who knew if that was victory or defeat? His last vision was of the white veil that hid her now. After all, and at last, she had become utterly private.

I had the illusion of conversing with a fellow being without a barrier, without a steel door, without a black hood over my head . . . I have never, I think, impressed upon you how almost impossible I find it to communicate with anybody.

The grass on the other side of the road was a pullulating emerald green, the rocks that grew here and there among the grass were almost dazzlingly alight with little diamonds. The warm air met me in a wave, thick with land smells of earth and growth and flowers.

The presence of the loved one is perhaps always accompanied by anxiety. Mortals must tremble, where angels might enjoy. But this one grain of darkness cannot be accounted a blemish. It graces the present moment with a kind of violence which makes an ecstasy of time.

Death is not the consummation of oneself but just the end of oneself. Before the self vanishes nothing really is, and that is how it is most of the time. But as soon as the self vanishes everything is, and becomes automatically the object of love. Love holds the world together, and if we could forget ourselves everything in the world would fly into a perfect harmony, and when we see beautiful things that is what they remind us of.

There is so much grit in the bottom of the container, almost all our natural preoccupations are low ones, and in most cases the rag-bag of consciousness is only unified by the experience of great art or of intense love. Neither of these was relevant to my messy and absent-minded goings-on.

What dangerous machines letters are. Perhaps it is as well that they are going out of fashion. A letter can be endlessly reread and reinterpreted, it stirs imagination and fantasy, it persists, it is red-hot evidence. It was a long time since I had received anything resembling a love letter.

When I think of the books I love, there’s always a little laughter in the dark. I love Jane Eyre; I don’t love Wuthering Heights. I love Tolstoy; I don’t love Dostoevsky. I love Joyce; I don’t love Proust. I love Nabokov; I don’t love Pasternak. I don’t think I’m a funny person, but the fiction I grew up on was leavened with humor—I understand the other tradition and I admire it, but I just don’t love it. It never occurs to me to write as, say, A. S. Byatt writes, as I’m sure she would never dream in a squillion years of writing like me. The ironic theme in English writing—and I don’t mean po-mo irony, I mean the irony of someone like Defoe or Dickens—is either in you or it isn’t. Those who find Austen arch and cold and ironical, lacking the kind of intimate and metaphysical commitment of a writer like Emily Brontë cannot be convinced otherwise and vice versa. I appreciate both schools, but I can’t get out of the side I’m on. I don’t think I’d want to, though occasionally I have wet dreams about turning into Iris Murdoch.

The trouble with you, Charles, is that basically you despise women, whereas I, in spite of some appearances to the contrary, do not." "I don't despise women. I was in love with all Shakespeare's heroines before I was twelve." "But they don't exist, dear man, that's the point. They live in the never-never land of art, all tricked out in Shakespeare's wit and wisdom, and mock us from there, filling us with false hopes and empty dreams. The real thing is spite and lies and arguments about money.

Extreme continuing unhappiness often consoles itself with images of death which may in a sense be idle, but which can play a vital part in consolation and also in the continuance of illusion. If that happens I am dead, consoles, and also dulls the edge of speculation and even of conscience. It is another way of saying, to me that cannot happen.

There had been anguish, fear, indecision, then gradually the brightness of her presence cast beforehand, obliterating all else. Then I was with her and there was strange blankness, and utter calm of delight. Suddenly, down into the furthest crannies of being all was well. It was all so strangely simple too, with a blameless simplicity as of childhood.

You don’t respect me,’ said Dora, her voice trembling. ‘Of course I don’t respect you,’ said Paul. ‘Have I any reason to? I’m in love with you, unfortunately, that’s all.

Outsiders who see rules and not the love that runs through them are often too ready to label other people as 'prisoners'.

Perhaps 'love' had always been for me an ignis fatuus.

Mercifully one forgets one’s love affairs as one forgets one’s dreams.

Love, yes. But sometimes love must sacrifice itself in order to remain love.

The conversation in the Old Brompton Road was more like an experience of the inferno, but lovers are accustomed to fire.

Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. - Iris Murdoch

I don't know what love can do for the terrible things of life.

To find someone — oh yes — that is the problem. To have mutual love, that is so difficult indeed.

Oh why is she going away just when I want so much to be with her! She is the answer to the riddle of my life.

I must return to my freedom which I now realise is something so essential that it makes my love for you seem like death.

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.

These words had impressed Clement deeply, inscribed upon his heart.

Moreover, and of course, she loved him; but in Sefton's stern code her love had always been chained up, and howled fruitlessly, as indeed it did now.

She's also in love with the 'Polish Rider'." "Who's he?" "A picture by Rembrandt.

We all love a glimpse of Lucas, it's a religious experience.

This then was love, to look and look until one exists no more, this was the love which was the same as death.

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.

They had become, year by year, month by month, mysterious to her, her love for them an extended pain, a web or field of force, of which she felt at times the almost breaking tension.

I was perhaps moreover a little the dupe of that illusion of lovers that the beloved object must, somehow, respond, that an extremity of love not only merits but compels some return.

But now, when things had happened which were too appalling to think about, when his romantic love was a corpse and his cleverness a ghost, he knew where it was he wanted to lay his head.

How fearful that dark shadow is when we catch sight of it in the life of another. No wonder those at whom that black arrow is aimed so often turn and flee. How unendurable it can be, the love another bears us. I would never persecute my darling with that dread knowledge. From now onward until the world ended everything must remain, although utterly changed, exactly as it was before.

There are things which are appalling to young people because young people think life should be happy and free. But life is never really happy and free in any beautiful sense. Happiness is a weak and paltry thing and perhaps"freedom" has no meaning. There are great patterns in which we are involved, and destinies which belong to us and which we love even in the moment when they destroy us.

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.

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.

It is not simply that suppression of self is required before accurate vision can be obtained. The great artist sees his objects (and this is true whether they are sad, absurd, repulsive or even evil) in a light of justice and mercy. The direction of attention is, contrary to nature, outward, away from self which reduces all to a false unity, towards the great surprising variety of the world, and the ability so to direct attention is love.

In a century or two this planet will have been destroyed by external cosmic forces or by the senseless activity of the human race. Human life is a freak phenomenon, soon to be blotted out. That is a consoling thought. Meanwhile we are surrounded by strange invisible entities, possibly your angels." "I hope so." "Ah, you think they are good, they cannot be good, there is no good, the tendency to evil is overwhelming. One has only to think of the horrors of sex, its violence, its cruelty, its filthy vulgarity, its descent into bestial degradation. You had better go and dream in your monastery." "Would you come and visit me there?" "Of course not. I do not visit. Only, unfortunately, am sometimes visited." "You don't want to discuss — you know — what happened? My priest said — " "No." "I care about how you are, I love you." "You still fail to realise how this sort of talk sickens me. Now please go. This will do for a welcome home scene. Tell them not to come. I desire to be left alone.

A love without reservation ought to be a life force compelling the world into order and beauty. But that love can be so strong and yet so entirely powerless is what breaks the heart. Love did not move toward life, it moved toward death, toward the roaring sea-caves of annihilation. Or it led to the futility of a little broken bird's egg whose remains were now being washed away by water from the tap. Even so one day God might crack the universe and wash away its fruitless powerless loves with a deluge of indifferent power.

This is perhaps the saddest experience in the demise of love and the most difficult for the imagination to encompass: to come to know that someone who loved you once now regards you as boring and annoying and unimportant. Sheer hatred might even be preferred to this.

Aleph was such a prize, and he was such a pirate.' 'My mother said that Aleph would be carried off by an older man, a tycoon - well, I suppose Lucas qualified - but how can they be happy? That seems impossible.' 'I can see them as happy.' 'Beauty and the Beast. Women love Beasts.

Louise was a jewel locked away; and after the first 'if only' period had passed and Clement had got used to 'Mrs Anderson', he felt that his love for her had not faded, but had suffered a sea change into something special and unique, causing a special and unique and much valued, pain.

I contemplated her, seeing her young bland face looking at me, now removed as if behind a gauze curtain. She quietly invited me to suffer. There was a great space now, a great silent hall in which this suffering could take place. There was no urgency now, nothing to plan, nothing to achieve. What shall I do with it, I asked her, what shall I do now with my love for you which you so terribly revived by reappearing in my life? Why did you come back, if you could not content me? What can I do now with the great useless machine of my love which has no wholesome work to do? I can do nothing for you any more, my darling. I wondered if I would be fated to live with this love, making of it a shrine which could not now be desecrated. Perhaps when I was living alone and being everyone's uncle like a celibate priest I would keep this fruitless love as my secret chapel. Could I then learn to love uselessly and unpossessively and would this prove to be the monastic mysticism which I had hoped to attain when I came away to the sea?

Perhaps our thoughts hold the dead captive as they do the living; and perhaps their thoughts can touch us too. 'What are you thinking?' she had cried. 'Oh how it maddens me not to know!' Or was it he who had said that? Alive, their love had been a mutual torment. Death, which might have imposed a merciful silence upon this dialogue, had not done so. He had so often wanted to silence her thoughts. Were they silent now, or were they still gabbling away just on the other side of his awareness? Could not the survivor end this wicked servitude and set at liberty the frenzied ghost? How was this to be done? They had loved each other. How little this seemed now to avail. Love was itself the madness.

I felt a tenderness for her that was deep and pure, a miracle of love preserved. How clear it flowed, that fountain from the far past. Yes, we must quietly collect our past, collect it up with tacit understanding, without any intensity or drama, blaming and exonerating ourselves with a difference. And how wonderfully possible it seemed, this silent process of redemption,

But all this, all this shift and change, thought Bellamy, is part of the vast lie which surrounds me and wherein I move from one fantasy to another. I wanted to escape to solitude and darkness in a holy place, but the dark is just the old dark of meaninglessness and falsehood, which separates me from my friends and from the real world where people love and help each other.

Tenderness and absolute trust and communication and truth matter more and more as one grows older. Somehow let us not waste love, it is rare. Can we not love each other at last in freedom, without awful possessiveness and violence and fear? Love matters, not ‘in love’. Let there be no more partings now. Let there be peace between us now forever, we are no longer young. Love me, love me enough.

As he rose to go and held Louise's hand and gazed at her he felt for a moment his old love for her taking possession of his whole being. They looked at each other. I feed upon this looking, thought Clement, but does she? I don't know, and I cannot ask. I am terrified of saying something which would wound our whole precious relationship. We are well as we are. I love her, that's all, that is my drama.

Can you see that cat?’ ‘Yes, of course.’ ‘Well, until lately I couldn’t have seen it at all. Now it exists, it’s there, and while it’s there I’m not, I just see it and let it be. Do you remember that bit in the Ancient Mariner where he sees the water snakes? “Oh happy living things, no tongue their beauty might declare!” That’s what it’s like, suddenly to be able to see the world and to love it, to be let out of oneself –

Being in love has its own self-certifying universality, it informs and glorifies the world with an energy which, like a drug, becomes a necessity of consciousness. Without it, the scene is dark, without that throbbing communication, dead. A mad state, perhaps an undesirable one, inimical to justice, benevolence, common sense. But, for its slaves, it justifies itself as, for the ordinary unsaintly man, nothing else ever does.

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.

How recognisable, how familiar to us, is the man so beautifully portrayed in the 'groundwork', who confronted even with Christ turns away to consider the judgement of his own conscience and to hear the voice of his own reason...This man is with us still, free, independent, lovely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy. The raison detre of this attractive but misleading creature is not far to seek. He is the offspring of the age of science, confidently rational, and yet increasingly aware of his alienation from the material universe which his discoveries reveal... his alienation from the material universe which his discoveries reveal..his alienation is without cure... It is not such a long step from Kant to Neitzsche to existentialism, and the Anglo-Saxon ethical doctrines which in some ways closely resemble it.... In fact, Kant's man had already received a glorious incarnation nearly a century earlier in the work of Milton: his proper name is Lucifer.

Here was another 'if only' — if only he had acted quickly, spontaneously, throwing 'tact' and 'good form' to the winds. Just then she had needed him, and he had failed. This bitter reflection positively, for a time, hindered his strange friendship with Louise, he avoided her almost to the point of boorishness, almost deliberately seeming to have lost his interest and his affection. The pain of his 'might have been' led him instinctively to devalue his loss, make it not a loss but something inconceivable and nil.

My love for you is quiet at last. I don’t want it to become a roaring furnace. If I could have suffered more I would have suffered more. Receive us now as if we were your children. Tenderness and absolute trust and communication and truth matter more and more as one grows older. Somehow let us not waste love, it is rare. Can we not love each other at last in freedom, without awful possessiveness and violence and fear? Love matters, not ‘in love’. Let there be no more partings now. Let there be peace between us now forever, we are no longer young.

How could I so love someone whom I could never see or know, the person indeed who was of all the farthest from me, the most ineluctably separated? What awful suffering, not yet felt, not yet revealed, would this involve? Was this the punishment, the expiation, the end, the dark hole into which I would finally disappear? Yet even then I knew that from myself I would not disappear. I would go on indestructibly, day after day, week after week, year after year, and I would not break down and no one would ever hear me scream. That was the worst of it. And with this worst was interwoven the fact and miracle of love with all its gentleness and its vision and its pure joy.

And all that time, Franca contained in her breast a storm of anguish and violence so terrible that she had at times, when she was alone and longing to 'break down', to clutch her breast with a fierce answering force to keep the black horror from spurting forth. Her face was calm and benign, always in company, and usually alone too, for she was aware that to play such a part properly allowed of no rest periods, no weak moments of unmasking. She must continue, in her deceit, whole, like the spy who, in order to go on, has to become what he seems. She was, daily, amazed at herself, at her self-control; and at the terrible demons which fed upon her, and in doing so, she realised, fed her. She had begun to need her rage and her hate, even of late her fierce cruel fantasies. She could not, and did not try to, riddle out, rationally order, explain, least of all banish, these horrible consolations, As it seemed, if she were not to die of her love she had to poison it; and even, over its death agonies, to exult. As the days went by, Franca cherished and nourished and developed her suffering, unable to envisage any change or any plan — any machine into which so much relentless force might be fed. Indeed she was afraid to plan or picture a different future of any kind. So long as she stayed silent she had a secret weapon. If she spoke, if once there were the least word, the least crack or fissure, upon which tears and screams could follow, she would have lost her one advantage, her source of ordinary viable life, and would be utterly undone and destroyed.

She was listening to a voice, a much loved voice, a voice of authority, which said: simplify your life, travel light, do not become involved with family problems, possessions, or the troubles of others, do not marry, marriage ends truthfulness, live with solitude, solitude is essential if real thinking is to take place. She thought, he will never forgive, me, he will despise me and cast me out, he warned me against the ambiguous Eros, the deceiver, the magician, the sophist, the maker of drugs and poisons. Of course I am in love, yes, this is love, and I am sick with it - but what follows? Do I really believe that I shall give over my life, the whole of my life, which is only just now really beginning to another person? Shall I cease forever to be the cat that walks by herself in the wild lone? What has happened to my soldierly completeness with which I was so content, my satisfaction and my pride?

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.

He went away, bent double with the pains of remorse and regret and the inward biting of a love which had now no means of expression. He remembered now when it was useless how the Abbess had told him that the way was always forward. Nick had needed love, and he ought to have given him what he had to offer, without fears about its imperfection. If he had had more faith he would have done so, not calculating either Nick’s faults or his own. Michael recalled too how, with Toby; he had acted with more daring, and had probably acted wrong. Yet no serious harm had come to Toby; besides he had not loved Toby as he loved Nick, was not responsible for Toby as he had been for Nick. So great a love must have contained some grain of good, something at least which might have attached Nick to this world, given him some glimpse of hope. Wretchedly Michael forced himself to remember the occasions on which Nick had appealed to him since he came to Imber, and how on every occasion Michael had denied him. Michael had concerned himself with keeping his own hands clean, his own future secure, when instead he should have opened his heart: should impetuously and devotedly and beyond all reason have broken the alabaster cruse of very costly ointment.