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The Sea, The Sea

Book by Iris Murdoch · 50 quotes · The Sea The Sea, Iris Murdoch, Love

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The Sea, The Sea Quotes

“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.”

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“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?”

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“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.”

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“Even if readers claim that they 'take it all with a grain of salt', they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and because anything which is written down is likely to be 'true in a way'. I trust this passing reflection will not lead anyone to doubt the truth of any part of this story! When I come to describe my life with Clement Makin credulity will be strained but will I hope not fail!”

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“The trouble with you, Charles, is that basically you despise women, whereas I, in spite of some appearances to the contrary, do not." "I don't despise women. I was in love with all Shakespeare's heroines before I was twelve." "But they don't exist, dear man, that's the point. They live in the never-never land of art, all tricked out in Shakespeare's wit and wisdom, and mock us from there, filling us with false hopes and empty dreams. The real thing is spite and lies and arguments about money.”

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“I was silent while a whole world of possibilities gradually folded themselves up, like some trick of stagecraft, quietly collapsing, folding, merging, becoming very small and vanishing. So that—was that—at any rate. And I would have to think, to invent, in a new way, to exist in this situation which was now, I realized, whatever was the case with Hartley, the continuing and only situation for me, the final state of affairs, the world centre. 'I'm sorry,' I said. She shook her head slightly, jerked it with emotion, at this last awkward tribute. A short litany, a vast brief Amen.”

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“What had been made clear in the last two days (which seemed like months) was how far I had been right in thinking that there was only one real love in my life. It was as if I had in some spiritual sense actually married Hartley long ago and was simply not free to look elsewhere. Of course I had really known this all along. But on seeing her again the sense of absolute belongingness had been overwhelming; in the teeth of our fates' most exquisite cruelty, in the teeth of all the evidence, we belonged to each other.”

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“Of course we live in dreams and by dreams, and even in a disciplined spiritual life, in some ways especially there, it is hard to distinguish dream from reality. In ordinary human affairs humble common sense comes to one's aid. For most people common sense is moral sense. But you seem to have deliberately excluded this modest source of light. Ask yourself, what really happened between whom all those years ago? You've made it into a story, and stories are false.”

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“Singing is of course a form of aggression. The wet open mouths and glistening teeth of the singers are ardent to devour the victim-hearer. Singers crave hearers as animals crave their prey. Intoxicated by their own voices they now roared it out, round and round, Gilbert's fruity baritone, Titus's pseudo-Neapolitan tenor and Rosina's strong rather harsh contralto. I shouted, 'Stop! Stop that bloody row!' But they went on singing at me, their bright eyes, moist with laughter, fixed upon me, waving their arms in time to the tune; until at last they wearied, stopped, and went off into another crazy laughing fit.”

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