Iris Murdoch

"The cry of equality pulls everyone down."

"We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is."

"Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self."

"We can only learn to love by loving."

"Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is."

"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."