The Sea, The Sea

by Iris Murdoch

The end of life is rightly thought of as a period of meditation. Will I be sorry that I did not begin it sooner?

Indeed eating is so pleasant one should even try to suppress thought. Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Every meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger.

She was a hard worker and had a kind of steady Scottish reliability which always helped.

Tenderness and absolute trust and communication and truth: these things matter more and more as one grows older.

She knows how I hate exhibitions of emotion, but she pours it all out all the same.

He did not care about the worldly goods,

He says this of his father. It well described my Dad as well. He would use the same couplet "worldly goods".

Outsiders who see rules and not the love that runs through them are often too ready to label other people as ‘prisoners’.

Well, autobiography cannot be self-indulgent fun all of the time.

we’ve talked it all out, we’ve sort of repossessed the past together and redeemed it—’

‘We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason.

and there was an intelligence in her quiet negative reception of the kiss which was itself a communication.

A shared past, that is something.

I was continually conscious of Hartley, as of her real presence, and she was with me as Jesus used to be with me when I was a child.

‘Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.’

Those who are caught in mental cages can often picture freedom, it just has no attractive power.

‘I am an actor. And perhaps I was pleased to see you. We sometimes like to see people whom we hate and despise so that we can stir them up to further demonstrations of how odious they are.’

Our lusts and attachments compose our god. And when one attachment is cast off another arrives by way of consolation. We never give up a pleasure absolutely, we only barter it for another.

At the time they seemed to me to be mere out-pourings of self-deceiving nonsense.

Obsessive guilt can survive through the years and animate the ghost of the offended one.

The fallibility of memory and its feeble range make perfect reconciliations impossible.

One can be too ingenious in trying to search out the truth. Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face.

Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder?