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
Nothing is more beautifully and acceptably self-assertive than good singing.
Daytime sleep is a cursed slumber from which one wakes in despair.
There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together.
Real misery cuts off all paths to itself.
A middling talent makes for a more serene life.
Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them.
The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick, or a self-destroying or ever murderous obsession.
My heart was beating like an army on the march.
... when caught unawares I usually tell the truth, and what's duller than that?
Nothing is more maddening than being questioned by the object of one's interest about the object of hers, should that object not be you.
The most interesting things are always happening behind one.
The notion that one can liberate another soul from captivity is an illusion of the very young.
any writer is inevitably going to work with his own anxieties and desires. If the book is any good it has got to have in it the fire of a personal unconscious mind.
Mathematics is good for the soul, getting things right enlivens a sense of truth, efforts to understand automatically purify desires.