Quotes & anectdotes from
the wise,
the foolish,
the courageous &
the drunk

Iris Murdoch Novelist

  • Gender: Female
  • Citizenship: United Kingdom
  • Born: Jul 15, 1919
  • Died: Feb 8, 1999

Dame Iris Murdoch DBE 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".

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

We can only learn to love by loving.

Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.

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

We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.

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

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

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.

Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.