"I took a deep breath, however, and followed my rule of never speaking frankly to women in moments of emotion. No good ever comes of this. It is not in my nature to make myself responsible for other people. I find it hard enough to pick my own way along."

"Women think that beauty lies in approximation to a harmonious norm. The only reason why they fail to make themselves indistinguishably similar is that they lack the time and the money and the technique."

"Subtle people, like myself, can see too much ever to give a straight answer. Aspects have always been my trouble."

"What is more tormenting than a meeting after a long time, when all the words fall to the ground like dead things, and the spirit that should animate them floats disembodied in the air?"

"I was greatly attached to her, but I could see even then that her character was not all that it should be. Anna is one of those women who cannot bear to reject any offer of love. It is not exactly that it flatters her. She has a talent for personal relations, and she yearns for love as a poet yearns for an audience. To anyone who will take the trouble to become attached to her she will immediately give a devoted, generous, imaginative, and completely uncapricious attention, which is still a calculated avoidance of self-surrender. . . . This has the sad result too that her existence is one long act of disloyalty; and when I knew her she was constantly involved in secrecy and lying in order to conceal from each of her friends the fact that she was so closely bound to all the others. Or sometimes she would try another technique, that of deadening, by small and steady shocks, the sharpness of jealousy, until in the end the victim became resigned to the liberal scope of her affections, while remaining just as much her slave as ever. I don't care for this; and I saw through Anna very rapidly. Yet my interpretation of her never robbed her of her mystery, nor did her emotional promiscuity ever turn me against her. Perhaps this was because I so constantly felt, like the warm breeze that blows from a longed-for island bringing the seafarer the scent of flowers and fruit, the strength and reality of her tenderness for me. I knew that it was very possible that it was with exactly this charm that she held all her admirers. But it made no difference."

-----Under the Net, Iris Murdoch