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
To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare's, the Cornish sea.
Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.
Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.
Every artist is an unhappy lover.
Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.
Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.
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.
Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.
youth is a marvelous garment
Every persisting marriage is based on fear', said Peregrine. 'Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what's at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower...
Jealousy comes from self-love rather than from true love.
Every human soul has seen, perhaps before their birth pure forms such as justice, temperance, beauty and all the great moral qualities which we hold in honour. We are moved towards what is good by the faint memory of these forms simple and calm and blessed which we saw once in a pure, clear light being pure ourselves.
There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.
Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.