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The Sea, the Sea
Iris Murdoch
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.”
“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.”
“What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
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Book Keywords:
dissociated, iris-murdoch, apart, invisible, outcast, self, failure, alone, self-knowledge, hidden-self, stupidity, lonely, the-sea-the-sea, self-deception, mind