Degrees of Freedom Quotes

“What I speak of is the real decision as we experience it; and here the movement away from theory and generality is the movement towards truth. All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to creep under the net.4”
― A.S. Byatt, Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch

“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’.”
― A.S. Byatt, Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch

“The practitioners of ‘dry’ art admire myth and symbol, precision and coherence; they would, theoretically, be more excited by an interpretation of one of Shakespeare’s plays which offered them a beautifully plotted, ‘containing’ framework of themes and recurrent symbols, than by one which placed its main emphasis on Shakespeare’s skill in reproducing the accidental, the idiosyncratic happenings of life, or his power to arouse in the audience an immediate emotional attachment to Falstaff.”
― A.S. Byatt, Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch