Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch
Dame Jean Iris Murdoch DBEwas an Irish novelist and philosopher, best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, Under the Net, was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 1987, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Her books include The Bell, A Severed Head, The Red and the Green,...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth15 July 1919
CountryIreland
Iris Murdoch quotes about
No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak.
The sending of a letter constitutes a magical grasp upon the future.
A long marriage is very unifying, even if it's not ideal, and those old structures must be respected.
In a happy marriage there is a continuous dense magnetic sense of communication.
for most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter.
I think philosophy is extremely good training for anyone who wants to do anything. Although that is an idea which people may speak scornfully of now, I think it does teach one to
until I have been able to bury my head so deep in dear London that I can forget that I have ever been away I am inconsolable.
Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
Another person's illness is often harder to bear than one's own.
How rarely can happiness be really innocent and not triumphant, not an insult to the deprived.
The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.
We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason.