The Sea The Sea Quotes

“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

“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

“One can be too ingenious in trying to search out the truth. Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face. Of course this is a love story.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“If there is any fruitless mental torment which is greater than that of jealousy it is perhaps remorse. Even the pains of loss may be less searching; and often of course these agonies combine, as now they did for me. I say remorse not repentance. I doubt if I have ever experienced repentance in a pure form; perhaps it does not exist in a pure form. Remorse contains guilt, but helpless hopeless guilt which knows of no cure for the painful bite.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“We are all potentially demons to each other, but some close relationships are saved from this fate.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“I accused Hartley of being a 'fantasist', or perhaps that was Titus's word, but what a 'fantasist' I have been myself. I was the dreamer, I the magician. How much, I see as I look back, I read into it all, reading my own dream text and not looking at the reality. Hartley had been right when she said of our love that it was not part of the real world. It had no place.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“We were eternally divided. And it somehow seemed strange to me that this had not happened earlier, so dangerous were we to each other.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“Decide what you want and go for it, Fred, it's just a matter of will power!" I remember you saying that to me more than once.'

I did not recall saying this nor did it sound like anything which anyone would say more than once, assuming he had ever had the misfortune to say it at all, but I was glad that Freddie had such rosy memories.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“I contemplated her, seeing her young bland face looking at me, now removed as if behind a gauze curtain. She quietly invited me to suffer. There was a great space now, a great silent hall in which this suffering could take place. There was no urgency now, nothing to plan, nothing to achieve. What shall I do with it, I asked her, what shall I do now with my love for you which you so terribly revived by reappearing in my life? Why did you come back, if you could not content me? What can I do now with the great useless machine of my love which has no wholesome work to do? I can do nothing for you any more, my darling. I wondered if I would be fated to live with this love, making of it a shrine which could not now be desecrated. Perhaps when I was living alone and being everyone's uncle like a celibate priest I would keep this fruitless love as my secret chapel. Could I then learn to love uselessly and unpossessively and would this prove to be the monastic mysticism which I had hoped to attain when I came away to the sea?”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“And I thought, rolling my head to and fro between my hands in anguish, oh if only it could have worked somehow for us two.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“There was a sort of grey dripping figure that kept trying to rise up in my mind and which I ruthlessly violently banished.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“How soon we cover up the horror of death and loss, if we can, with almost any sort of explanation, as if we had to justify the very fate which had maimed us.”
― iris murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“But I had come to where I had never been before, the blessed point of sufficient desperation.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“Who is one's first love? Who indeed.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“That is no doubt how the story ought to end, with the seals and the stars, explanation, resignation, reconciliation, everything picked up into some radiant bland ambiguous higher significance, in calm of mind, all passion spent. 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; so I thought I might continue the tale a little longer in the form once again of a diary, though I suppose that, if this is a book, it will have to end, arbitrarily enough no doubt, in quite a short while.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“I have battered destructively and in vain upon the mystery of someone else's life and must cease at last.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“But these speculations are too nightmarish. Better to feel 'I shall never know'.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“My God, that bloody casket has fallen on the floor! Some people were hammering in the next flat and it fell off its bracket. The lid has come off and whatever was inside it has certainly got out. Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder?”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“I wanted to drag us all down into some common pool of feeling, I wanted to stop this conventional machine of awful insincere politeness.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“The madcap English weather which had been putting on a passable imitation of June now decided to play March.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“What larks we had," said James.

"When?"

"When we were young."

I could not recall any larks I had had with James. I poured out the wine and we sat in silence.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“Everyone seemed to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed except me.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“I'm afraid I don't know their address, but there it is, when people are gone they're gone, isn't it.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“Were they waltzing, at that fleeting moment which the camera seized and tossed on into the future? Her feet seem scarcely to touch the dance floor.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“Yes of course I was in love with my own youth. Aunt Estelle? Not really. Who is one's first love?”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“God, how the young and beautiful vanish and are no more seen.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“How rewarding it would be" to “write the whole of one’s life thus bit by bit as a novel. . . . The pleasant parts would be doubly pleasant, the funny parts funnier, and sin and grief would be softened by a light of philosophic consolation.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“So Titus was here too. Titus, and the sea monster, and the stars, and holding Hartley's hand in the cinema over forty years ago.”
― Iris Murdoch

“I was beginning to have an old familiar sensation which, oddly enough, I tended to forget in the interim, a feeling of disappointment and frustrated helplessness, as if I had looked forward to talking to James and had then been deliberately excluded from some kind of treat; as if something significant which I wanted to tell him had been, inside my very soul, shrivelled, trivialized by a casual laser beam of his intelligence. James’s mode of thought, his level of abstraction, was entirely unlike mine and he seemed to be sometimes almost frivolously intent upon exhibiting the impossibility of any communication between us. But of course really there was no intent, and indeed no treat, and in many ways my cousin could be seen as a bore, as an eccentric pedant with a kind of world-weariness which was simply tedious. He too after all had had his disappointments and about the most important of these I would doubtless never know. I suppose what I wanted was simply some ordinary amicable converse with James, which never happened, and which I was perhaps wrong in thinking that I could even imagine.”
― Iris Murdoch

“She gave me her limp hand. It felt damp and unresponsive and small and I could not continue the gesture into an embrace. She withdrew her hand and began to fiddle in her handbag. She brought out a fragment of the mirror which had been broken by Rosina’s kick, then a small white handkerchief. As soon as she had the handkerchief in her hand she began very quietly to cry. I felt so touched and sad, and yet so oddly proudly detached and somehow sentimental, as I seemed to see in a second, all rolled up into a ball and all vanishing, some life that I might have had with Lizzie, my Cherubino, my Ariel, my Puck, my son: some life we might have had together if I had been different, and she had been different. Now it was gone, whatever happened next, and the world was changed.”
― Iris Murdoch