1,162 Quotes by Iris Murdoch

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.

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

Of course we live in dreams and by dreams, and even in a disciplined spiritual life, in some ways especially there, it is hard to distinguish dream from reality. In ordinary human affairs humble common sense comes to one's aid. For most people common sense is moral sense. But you seem to have deliberately excluded this modest source of light. Ask yourself, what really happened between whom all those years ago? You've made it into a story, and stories are false.

I think we belong to each other.

He wanted to take her in his arms, he wanted to be utterly revealed to her, he wanted her to understand.

Never swim in a rough sea, dear boy, this sea's a killer. But the past refused to come back, as it did in dreams, to be remade. Titus walked in my dreams in the brightness of his youth, which was now made eternal. Or else I dreamed that he was dead and felt joy on waking.

He was glad she had come; she was for him, as he for her, 'another place'.

And even in those seconds, and even as I wondered with anguish whether I would ever see her again, I lived with her in some angelic timeless world of quiet communication and absolute understanding.

He did not read. This continued to amaze Ludens who could not imagine existence without reading.