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
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.
How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.
I hate solitude, but I'm afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It's already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.
Every persisting marriage is based on fear', said Peregrine. 'Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what's at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower...
Nothing is more beautifully and acceptably self-assertive than good singing.
We must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason.
People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.
Jealousy comes from self-love rather than from true love.
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...