Quotes by Iris Murdoch

About Iris Murdoch:

Dame Jean Iris Murdoch was an Irish-born British author 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. In 2008, The Times ranked Murdoch twelfth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

Iris Murdoch

El sexo es un invento absurdo que a pesar de serlo no aspira más que hincharse y penetrar. Se supone que tiene algo que ver con el amor, por lo menos ésa es su leyenda, pero el amor es un mito estimulante y aunque no lo fuese no podría tener relac...

Iris Murdoch

—¿Me querrás siempre? —No tengo ni la menor idea. —Pues yo a ti te querré siempre. —Eso está bien. ¿Podremos meternos por ahí? —No, no creo... Tú eres Apolo y yo soy Marsyas. Acabarás dejándome. —Eso de Apolo y Marsyas es una bue...

Iris Murdoch

The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak. You dedicate yourself passionately to something, to a project, to people, to a family, you think of nothing else for weeks and months, then suddenly it's over, it's perpetual...

Iris Murdoch

Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.

Iris Murdoch

I know how much you grieve over those who are under your care: those you try to help and fail, those you cannot help. Have faith in God and remember that He will is His own way and in His own time complete what we so poorly attempt. Often we do not a...

Iris Murdoch

Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.

Iris Murdoch

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 o...

Iris Murdoch

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Iris Murdoch

All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.

Iris Murdoch

There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.

Iris Murdoch

I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.

Iris Murdoch

We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we...

Iris Murdoch

As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.

Iris Murdoch

The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived, drugged, incarcerated, stupefied...

Iris Murdoch

Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.

Iris Murdoch

However, on one occasion, several years ago, I was idiot enough to take a dose of LSD. (I did it to please a woman.) I had what is known as a 'bad trip'. It was a very bad trip. I shall not attempt to describe what I experienced on that dreadful and ...

Iris Murdoch

What a queer gamble our existence is. We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge utterly and may lead in the end to heaven and to hell. Only later one sees how much and how awfully the fates differ. Yet what were the reasons for th...

Iris Murdoch

I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.

Iris Murdoch

That's how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that's how bloody awful it is being Irish!

Iris Murdoch

Author Bio

  • NameIris Murdoch
  • DescriptionBritish writer and philosopher
  • BornJuly 15, 1919
  • DiedFebruary 8, 1999
  • CountryIreland
  • ProfessionPoet; Philosopher; Novelist; Writer
  • AwardsDame Commander Of The Order Of The British Empire; James Tait Black Memorial Prize