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
In a happy marriage there is a continuous dense magnetic sense of communication.
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.
We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom
Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.
True love gallops, it flies, it is the swiftest of all modes of thought, swifter even than hate and fear.
... a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people.
Love is the last and secret name of all the virtues.
Being in love is an exhausting business.
Most of our love is shabby stuff, but there is always a thin line of gold, the bit of pure love on which all the rest depends -- and which redeems all the rest.
The notion that one can liberate another soul from captivity is an illusion of the very young.
Music relates sound and time and so pictures the ultimate edges of human commmunications.
The most interesting things are always happening behind one.
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.