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
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.
... when caught unawares I usually tell the truth, and what's duller than that?
My heart was beating like an army on the march.
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.
A long marriage is very unifying, even if it's not ideal, and those old structures must be respected.
The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life's most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in amazement at being so valued. The past is searched for the first signs and each one is in haste to declare all that he is so that no part of his being escapes the hallowing touch.
Marriage isn't a tram. It doesn't have to get anywhere.
Socrates wrote nothing. Christ wrote nothing.
The sending of a letter constitutes a magical grasp upon the future.
Love can't always do work. Sometimes it just has to look into the darkness.
The human soul is not framed for continued proximity, and the result of this enforced neighbourhood is often an appalling loneliness for which the rules of the game forbid assuagement.
It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown.