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
We re all muddlers. The thing is to see is when one's got to stop muddling.
The bottomless bitter misery of childhood: how little even now it is understood. Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.
... half the world starves. What a planet. And the eating, if you're lucky enough to do any. Stuffing pieces of dead animals into a hole in your face. Then munch, munch, munch. If there's anybody watching, they must be dying of laughter.
There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
It is in the capacity to love, that is to SEE, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists. The freedom which is a proper human goal is the freedom from fantasy, that is the realism of compassion. What I have called fantasy, the proliferation of blinding self-centered aims and images, is itself a powerful system of energy, and most of what is often called 'will' or 'willing' belongs to this system. What counteracts the system is attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love.
There is nothing like early promiscuous sex for dispelling life's bright mysterious expectations.
Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.
Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness.
Actors are cave dwellers in a rich darkness which they love and hate.
You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.
He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.
Language is a machine for making falsehoods.
Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved
Mathematics is good for the soul, getting things right enlivens a sense of truth, efforts to understand automatically purify desires.