Iris Murdoch - The Sea, the Sea (1978)

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We must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason.

Iris Murdoch
People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.

Iris Murdoch
Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.

Iris Murdoch
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
There is no triumph of good, and if there were it would not be a triumph of good.

Iris Murdoch
Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder.

Iris Murdoch
The human soul is not framed for continued proximity, and the result of this enforced neighbourhood is often an appalling loneliness for which the rules of the game forbid assuagement.

Iris Murdoch
Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.

Iris Murdoch
Food is a profound subject and one, incidentally, about which no writer lies.

Iris Murdoch
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.

Iris Murdoch
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 theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomime! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit : put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good.

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

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

Iris Murdoch
Actors are cave dwellers in a rich darkness which they love and hate.

Iris Murdoch
A long marriage is very unifying, even if it's not ideal, and those old structures must be respected.

Iris Murdoch
What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone's company you love them.

Iris Murdoch
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
Every persisting marriage is based on fear', said Peregrine. 'Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what's at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower...

Iris Murdoch
Guilt feelings so often arise from accusations rather than from crimes.

Iris Murdoch
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
A less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people.

Iris Murdoch
Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.

Iris Murdoch
Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.

Iris Murdoch
I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.

Iris Murdoch
One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.

Iris Murdoch