The words men used to describe the gods were the words they used for fetters or bonds, things which held the world together, within bounds, preventing the breakout of chaos and disorder.

Too much meaning is bad at Toussaint.Reason must sleep, said Christabel. The stories come before the meanings, I said. As I said, reason must sleep, she said again. I do not believe all these...

It is in the nature of the human frame to tire. Fortunately. Let us collude with necessity. Let us play with it.

Most of all, he saw her waist, just where it narrowed, before the skirts spread. He remembered her nakedness as he knew it, and his hands around that narrowing. He thought of her momentarily as an...

This is were I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the midpoint, to which everything ran, before and from which everything will run. But now, my...

Metamorphoses" he said, "are our way of showing, in riddles, that we know we are part of the animal world

he was always, as far as we can tell, the preux chevalier.

We run with milk and bloodWhat we would give we spillThe hungry mouths are raisedWe spill we fail to fillThis cannot be restoredThis flow cannot redeemThis white's not wiped awayThough blanched we...

What do you hope?Desire is a dowsed fireTrue love a lieTo a dusty shelf we aspire,I crave to die

And she was angry because she knew she was capable of many things she couldn't even define to herself, so they seemed like bad dreams - that is what she told me. She told me she was eaten up with...

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'.

He made the analogy, sometimes, almost bitterly, between Harald's collection of wing-cases and empty ribcages, elephant's feet and Paradise plumes, and Harald's interminably circular book on Design,...

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...

It is as though our dreams were watching us and directing our lives with external vigour whilst we simply enact their pleasures passively, in a swoon.

-in almost all stories of promises and prohibitions, the promises and prohibitions carry with them the inevitability of failure, of their own breaking.

She said, the Puritan Milton, on the contrary, makes the moment of the Nativity the moment of the death of Nature-at least, he calls on the old tradition that Greek travellers heard the shrines cry...

Val was eating cornflakes. She ate very little else, at home. They were light, they were pleasant, they were comforting, and then after a day or two they were like cotton wool.

The black thing in her brain and the dark water on the page were the same thing, a form of knowledge. This is how myths work. They are things, creatures, stories, inhabiting the mind. They cannot be...