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
The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.
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.
In a happy marriage there is a continuous dense magnetic sense of communication.
Marriage isn't a tram. It doesn't have to get anywhere.
People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.
There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.
No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
Dogs are very different from cats in that they can be images of human virtue. They are like us.
One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats
Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth -- well, it's like brown -- it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.
We defend ourself with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing
There is a spider called Amaurobius, which lives in a burrow and has its young in the late summer, and then it dies when the frosts begin, and the young spiders live through the cold by eating their mother's dead body. One can't believe that's an accident. I don't know that I imagined God as having thought it all out, but somehow He was connected with the pattern, He was the pattern...
All our failures are ultimately failures in love.