In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.
Iris MurdochWe live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.
Iris MurdochLove is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.
Iris MurdochThere is a spider called Amaurobius, which lives in a burrow and has its young in the late summer, and then it dies when the frosts begin, and the young spiders live through the cold by eating their mother's dead body. One can't believe that's an accident. I don't know that I imagined God as having thought it all out, but somehow He was connected with the pattern, He was the pattern.
Iris Murdoch