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 is no doubt another reason why she never went into films; her private life must be an almost full-time activity. 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. Iris Murdoch
About This Quote

Susan Sontag wrote this when she was in her mid-thirties. She was in love with a woman who was also in love with another woman. This woman, Susan’s friend, was in love with her best friend. This made it impossible for Susan to be with the woman she loved.

When she wrote this, she had just married the man who would become her husband for twenty years. The last quote is important because of how it describes Susan’s relationship with all of her friends. There are so many great quotes about relationships but this one is one of my favorites.

Source: Under The Net

Some Similar Quotes
  1. It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages. - Friedrich Nietzsche
  2. There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature. - Jane Austen
  3. If I had a flower for every time I thought of you... I could walk through my garden forever. - Alfred Tennyson
  4. You are my best friend as well as my lover, and I do not know which side of you I enjoy the most. I treasure each side, just as I have treasured our life together. - Nicholas Sparks
  5. Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grassthe world is too full to talk about. - Jalaluddin Rumi
More Quotes By Iris Murdoch
  1. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
  2. Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.
  3. I know how much you grieve over those who are under your care: those you try to help and fail, those you cannot help. Have faith in God and remember that He will is His own way and in His own time complete what we...
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  5. So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.
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