Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea Quotes

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!

Mercifully one forgets one's love affairs as one forgets one's dreams.

I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.

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.

It is necessary to write, that much is clear, and to write in a way quite unlike any way which I have employed before.

Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.

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.

Love doesn't think like that. All right, it's blind as a bat--''Bats have radar. Yours doesn't seem to be working.