Iris Murdoch (1919 – 1999)
Anglo-Irish novelist and philosopher, famed for her series of novels that combine rich characterization and compelling plotlines usually involving ethical or sexual themes.
The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.
I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.
The cry of equality pulls everyone down.
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.
Stuart was not dismayed by his sexual feelings about the boy.
All art is the struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.
We can only learn to love by loving.
Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.
Whit Meynell was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.
Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonising preoccupation with self.
Only lies and evil come from letting people off.
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.
Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.
Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.
But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.
I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wave-length of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.