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
Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!
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.
Another person's illness is often harder to bear than one's own.
Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.
I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.
The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.
Anything that consoles is fake.
I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.
In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.
The cry of equality pulls everyone down.
In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.