Quotes from The Sea, the Sea

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

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

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

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

“However, on one occasion, several years ago, I was idiot enough to take a dose of LSD. (I did it to please a woman.) I had what is known as a 'bad trip'. It was a very bad trip. I shall not attempt to describe what I experienced on that dreadful and rather shameful occasion. (I will only add: it concerned entrails.) In fact it would be extremely hard, even impossible, to put it properly into words. It was something morally, spiritually horrible, as if one's stinking inside had emerged and become the universe: a surging emanation of dark half-formed spiritual evil, something never ever to be escaped from. 'Undetachable,' I remember, was a word which somehow 'came along' with the impression of it. In fact the visual images involved were dreadfully clear and, as it were, authoritative ones and they are rising up in front of me at this moment, and I will not write about them. Of course i never took LSD again.”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea

“That's how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that's how bloody awful it is being Irish!”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from 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, quote from The Sea, the Sea

“But it was just luck really if the girls survived. You're like a man firing a machine gun into a supermarket who happens not to become a murderer.”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea

“It was a piece of thoroughly picturesque and proper violence. I like a violent man, really, a man who's a bit of a brute in a decent straightforward way.”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea

“You don't understand people like me, like us, the other ones. You're like a bird that flies in the air, a fish that swims in the sea. You move, you look about you, you want things. There are others who live on earth and move just a little and don't look--”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea

“Of course this chattering diary is a facade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure. Yet such pretenses are not only consolations but may even be productive of a little ersatz courage.”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea

“Only the deeper parts of the mind have so little sense of time.”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea

“The exercise of power is a dangerous delight.”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea

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

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Popular quotes

“And I ultimately not only addressed it, I named my two moods Roy and Pam. Roy is Rollicking Roy, the wild ride of a mood, and Pam is Sediment Pam, who stands on the shore and sobs. (Pam stands for “piss and moan.”) One mood is the meal, and the next mood is the check.”
― Carrie Fisher, quote from Wishful Drinking

“A soldier, as Bernard Shaw has said, “ostensibly a heroic and patriotic defender of his country, is really an unfortunate man driven by destitution to offer himself as food for powder for the sake of regular rations, shelter, and clothing.”
― Jack London, quote from The People of the Abyss

“The boundaries of this world are forever shifting – from day to night, joy to sorrow, love to hate, and from life itself to death; and who can say at what moment we may suddenly cross over the border, from one state of existence to another, like heat applied to some flammable substance? I have been given my own ever-changing margins, across which I move, continually and hungrily, like a migrating animal. Now civilized, now untamed; now responsive to decency and human concern, now viciously attuned to the darkest of desires.”
― Michael Cox, quote from The Meaning of Night

“What happened to the Ford?” “God, Gloria made me sell it. Supposedly, I had too much independence—that’s the new theory, that I ran off because of independence. Also, she wants me to see a shrink. She’s convinced that anyone who wouldn’t want to live with her has to be crazy.”
― W. Bruce Cameron, quote from A Dog's Journey

“The intruder shifted his weight and pulled the knife back, aiming at Gabriel’s chest. The moonlight glinted off the sharp blade and Gabriel found himself backed up against a wall.

There was no escape. Gabriel was going to have to bear the pain of a knife through his chest. He could do it. He would wait until the knife entered his flesh and then he’d snap the Ashman’s neck in half.

Yeah. That was a good plan.

Just as the knife came toward Gabriel, the Ashman grunted and pulled back, taking a few wobbly steps before falling to the floor.

Nate stood to the side, his hands on a large sword jutting from the Ashman’s back. He yanked out the sword, leaving the stranger’s body limp.

Nate stepped toward the Ashman’s body, looking him over timidly.

Without warning, the intruder rolled over and pulled himself up off the floor. Nate jumped back, lifted the sword in defense, and made a loud noise that sounded something like, “Arrrhh!”

Still clutching the bloody knife, the Ashman looked back and forth between Nate and Gabriel. Seeing he was outnumbered, he turned and ran back through the destruction of the living room.Jumping out of the gaping hole from the missing living room window, the Ashman disappeared into the storm

A moment passed as Gabriel and Nate stared after their attacker, both of them out of breath.

Still badly bleeding, Gabriel turned to Nate and looked at the weapon he held. The sword was oversized, extra shiny and had a very ornate handle. “I don’t remember ever seeing that sword in our arsenal before.”

Hunched over and trying to catch his breath, Nate said, “That’s because it’s from my arsenal.”

“So, you just had that,” Gabriel nodded at the weapon, “laying around?”

Nate righted himself and shrugged. “I’m a Zelda fan.”

“Ah.” Gabriel nodded. “And the noise you just made?”

“That was my battle cry.”

“Really?” Gabriel winced as he took a step forward. “It sounded more like the cry of a wounded animal. A cat, maybe. Or a small monkey.”

“Shut up.” Nate looked at Gabriel’s bleeding torso. “Are you okay?”
― Chelsea Fine, quote from Awry

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