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
for most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter.
I think the novel is essentially a comic form (tragedy is for the theatre), not meaning by that full of jokes, but that it is about the absurd detail of human life, the way in which one cannot fully understand what is happening. Life is muddle and jumble and ends inconclusively, and when this is presented with great comic art the sorrows of human life can be truthfully conveyed; one is moved by the spectacle, and feels that something truthful has been told in a magic way.
Daytime sleep is a cursed slumber from which one wakes in despair.
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.