Love Quote by Iris Murdoch

Murdoch treats heartbreak not as a melodrama but as a temporary corrective lens. The punch of “very enlightening” is its refusal to flatter romance: love doesn’t just warm the world, it edits it, narrowing perception until a single person becomes the organizing principle of reality. When that structure collapses, you don’t merely feel loss; you regain range. “Falling out” suggests gravity doing its indifferent work, a descent that hurts but also returns you to the ground of the actual.

The subtext is unmistakably Murdochian: love, for all its moral promise, easily becomes a form of fantasy, a private myth that recruits other people and events into its narrative. The phrase “new eyes” isn’t about cynicism so much as de-enchantment. You notice what you were trained not to see: friends you neglected, compromises you normalized, the way you performed a version of yourself to keep the story intact. That’s why the enlightenment is “for a short while.” Clarity is a liminal state, not a permanent upgrade. Humans can’t live long without consoling fictions; we reattach, we rebuild, we start re-editing.

Context matters: Murdoch’s novels and philosophy circle the problem of “unselfing,” the moral effort to see reality and other people without the distortions of ego and desire. Here, involuntary loss does the job that discipline usually fails to do. The line is also a quiet warning. If heartbreak briefly grants “new eyes,” then being in love might require a conscious counterpractice: refusing the easy hallucinations of devotion, choosing attention over projection.