The Sea, the Sea Quotes

“Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. But we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. Most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. We are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“I've felt as if I didn't exist, as if I were invisible, miles away from the world, miles away. You can't imagine how much alone I've been all my life.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“What a queer gamble our existence is. We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge utterly and may lead in the end to heaven and to hell. Only later one sees how much and how awfully the fates differ. Yet what were the reasons for the choice? They may have been forgotten. Did one know what one was choosing? Certainly not.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“As I lay there, listening to the soft slap of the sea, and thinking these sad and strange thoughts, more and more and more stars had gathered, obliterating the separateness of the Milky Way and filling up the whole sky. And far far away in that ocean of gold, stars were silently shooting and falling and finding their fates, among these billions and billions of merging golden lights. And curtain after curtain of gauze was quietly removed, and I saw stars behind stars behind stars, as in the magical Odeons of my youth. And I saw into the vast soft interior of the universe which was slowly and gently turning itself inside out. I went to sleep, and in my sleep I seemed to hear a sound of singing.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived, drugged, incarcerated, stupefied. This is partly because the audience is also a court against which there is no appeal.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“I ate and drank slowly as one should (cook fast, eat slowly) and without distractions such as (thank heavens) conversation or reading. 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.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“What an extraordinary satisfaction there is in cleaning things! (Does the satisfaction depend on ownership? I suspect so.)”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“Time, like the sea, unties all knots.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“let us not waste love, it is rare enough”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“There was something factitious and brittle and thereby utterly feminine about her charm which made me want to crush her, even to crunch her. She had a slight cast in one eye which gives her gaze a strange concentrated intensity. Her eyes sparkle, almost as if they were actually emitting sparks. She is electric. And she could run faster in very high-heeled shoes than any girl I ever met.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“Love doesn't think like that. All right, it's blind as a bat--'
'Bats have radar. Yours doesn't seem to be working.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“(I think I fell in love with you when you were shouting at Romeo and Juliet, 'Don't touch each other!')”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life. Still no letters.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea

“I had deluded myself throughout by the idea of reviving a secret love which did not exist at all.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“Sometimes I felt I would die by wishing it when I went to sleep but I always woke up again and found I was still there. Every morning finding I'm still me, that's hell."

"Well, get out of hell then! The gate's open and I'm holding it!"

"I can't. I'm hell, myself.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“Her eyes, which refused to meet mine, had the defensive coldness of those who are determined to lose hope.”
― iris murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomimes.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“white magic is black magic. a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people, and demons used for good can hang around and make mischief afterwards.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“I am beginning to ramble. It is evening. The sea is golden, speckled with white points of light, lapping with a sort of mechanical self-satisfaction under a pale green sky. How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life.
Still no letters.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea