Under the Net

by Iris Murdoch

Women think that beauty lies in approximation to a harmonious norm.

which is still a calculated avoidance of self-surrender.

The company which I need is the company which a pub or a café will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It’s already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.

I looked upon the face that I had known so well and now that for the first time I saw its beauty as mortal I felt that I had never loved it so dearly.

“Unsatisfied love is concerned with understanding. Only if it is all, all understanding, can it remain love while being unsatisfied.”

It seemed as if, for the first time, Anna really existed now as a separate being and not as a part of myself.

Anna was something which had to be learnt afresh. 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. I

and an empty day dawns which will dawn again and again to make mock of our contrived finalities.

Yet through this shaft of nothings we drive onward with that miraculous vitality that creates our precarious habitations in the past and the future.

of having conceived things as I pleased and not as they were.

“You never know what you won’t want to do when the time comes,”