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Portrait of Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch

(1919–1999) Novelist Ireland

306 quotes in 1087 categories

Iris Murdoch’s prose weaves together deep philosophical inquiry with vivid character study. In this collection of three hundred six quotes you’ll encounter the thoughtful, often challenging ideas that marked her work.

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Iris Murdoch was a novelist from Ireland, best known for The Bell.

Quick Facts About Iris Murdoch

Born: July 15, 1919
Died: February 8, 1999
Nationality: Ireland
Profession: Novelist
Notable works: The Bell
Known for: The Bell, The Sovereignty of Good, The Sea, the Sea, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist
Spouse: John Bayley

About Iris Murdoch

Dame Jean Iris Murdoch was an Irish and British novelist and philosopher. Murdoch is 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 (1954), was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Her 1978 novel The Sea, The Sea won the Booker Prize. In 1987, she was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II for services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked Murdoch twelfth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Biography source: Wikipedia

Awards & Honors

James Tait Black Memorial Prize Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences honorary doctor of the University of Hong Kong honorary doctor of Caen University Booker Prize

Quotes by Iris Murdoch

A middling talent makes for a more serene life.

Peace

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“I'm sorry I was awful. I'm so full of terrors.”

Apology

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“I know people can be awful dooms for each other.”

Awful

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... where does one person end and another person begin?

Begin

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Most real relationships are involuntary.

Involuntary

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My heart was beating like an army on the march.

Army

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Every artist is an unhappy lover.

Art

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Socrates wrote nothing. Christ wrote nothing.

Christ

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Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.

Involuntary

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One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance.

Marriage

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“What was to change many lives happened, and happened very fast in the next moments.”

Authorial-viewpoint

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“Her eyes, which refused to meet mine, had the defensive coldness of those who are determined to lose hope.”

Coldness

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On connecting: Where does one person end and another person begin?

Connecting

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I am not famous for anything in particular. I am just famous.

Fame

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Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.

Born

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The entry of a child into any situation changes the whole situation.

Child

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“He . . . felt as if, wanting to be needed by everyone, he were merely becoming some sort of semi-invisible messenger.”

Iris-murdoch

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People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about…

Flower

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“This talk of love means very little. Love is not a feeling. It can be tested. Love is action, it is silence.…

Little love

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“It is necessary at this point to recount what actually occurred, as opposed to what was generally supposed to have occurred, on…

Authorial-viewpoint

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“The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and…

Actor

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Freedom is not choosing; that is merely the move that we make when all is already lost. Freedom is knowing and understanding…

Choosing

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That's how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a…

Awful

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“The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction.”

Communication

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Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers,…

Anxiety

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Every human soul has seen, perhaps before their birth pure forms such as justice, temperance, beauty and all the great moral qualities…

Beauty

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... he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are…

Citizens

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there is a natural tribal hostility between the married and the unmarried. I cannot stand the shows so often quite instinctively put…

Fortunate

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“Death is not the consummation of oneself but just the end of oneself. Before the self vanishes nothing really is, and that…

Beauty

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“And oh, when we still used to sleep together, lying awake at night and finding one's only consolation in imagining in detail…

Awake at night

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So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the…

Death

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“There was something factitious and brittle and thereby utterly feminine about her charm which made me want to crush her, even to…

Femininity

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“Youth is a marvelous garment. How misplaced is the sympathy lavished on adolescents. There is a yet more difficult age which comes…

Ability to change

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“As I lay there, listening to the soft slap of the sea, and thinking these sad and strange thoughts, more and more…

Astronomy

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“He felt as if he were under an intolerable physical strain, as if his body were likely at any moment to fly…

Bad dream

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“Once in an endless meadow, just able to peer through the tawny haze of the grass tops, the child who was myself…

Amber eyes

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I think the novel is essentially a comic form (tragedy is for the theatre), not meaning by that full of jokes, but…

Absurd

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“I know how much you grieve over those who are under your care: those you try to help and fail, those you…

Better way

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“When the sun was set I might perhaps go to sleep. I never let myself sleep during the day. Daytime sleep is…

Sleep

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“The idea of attention or contemplation, of looking carefully at something and holding it before the mind, may be conveyed early on…

Art

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Iris Murdoch by topic

Love (49) Life (32) Art (25) Iris-murdoch (24) Humans (20) Artist (19) Time (17) People (17) Truth (15) Inspirational (14) World (13) Self (12) Writing (11) Love is (11) Soul (10) Philosophy (10) Men (10) Love Does (9) Theatre (9) Moral (9) Marriage (9) Psychology (8) May (8) Language (8) Failure (8)