George Barber

“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

“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

“The discussion that day was about loss of self, about Plato's four divine madnesses, about madness of all sorts; he began by talking about what he called the burden of the self, and why people want to lose the self in the first place.
'Why does that obstinate little voice in our heads torment us so?' he said, looking round the table. 'Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls – which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn't it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us.
Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think? Remember the Erinyes?'
'The Furies,' said Bunny, his eyes dazzled and lost beneath the bang of hair.
'Exactly. And how did they drive people mad? They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much themselves that they couldn't stand it.
'And how can we lose this maddening self, lose it entirely?
Love? Yes, but as old Cephalus once heard Sophocles say, the least of us know that love is a cruel and terrible master. One loses oneself for the sake of the other, but in doing so becomes enslaved and miserable to the most capricious of all the gods. War? One can lose oneself in the joy of battle, in fighting for a glorious cause, but there are not a great many glorious causes for which to fight these days.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I also thought, well why not just run down the hill, seize her by the hand, and pull her away with me, run away, anywhere, through the village, out into the fields. Spend the night at Amorne Farm and go to London by train tomorrow. Or get a lift on a lorry going anywhere: Manchester, York, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Carlisle.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea