Murdoch was born in Phibsborough, Dublin, Ireland, the daughter of Irene Alice and Wills John Hughes Murdoch. Her father, a civil servant, came from a mainly Presbyterian sheep farming family from Hillhall, County Down. In 1915, he enlisted as a soldier in King Edward’s Horse and served in France during the First World War before being commissioned as a Second lieutenant. Her mother had trained as a singer before Iris was born, and was from a middle-class Church of Ireland family in Dublin.
Iris Murdoch’s parents first met in Dublin when her father was on leave and were married in 1918. Iris was the couple’s only child. When she was a few weeks old the family moved to London, where her father had joined the Ministry of Health as a second-class clerk. She is a cousin of the Irish mathematician Brian Murdoch. (via Wikipedia)
Lets take a look on a few of her quotes that she shares with us:
On Love:
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.
Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
On Life:
We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.
One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats.
The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life’s major mysteries.
On Happiness:
Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
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 agonizing preoccupation with self.
On God:
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 achieve for others the good that we intend but achieve something, something that goes on from our effort. Good is an overflow. Where we generously and sincerely intend it, we are engaged in a work of creation which may be mysterious even to ourselves – and because it is mysterious we may be afraid of it. But this should not make us draw back. God can always show us, if we will, a higher and a better way; and we can only learn to love by loving. Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected but made perfect. The way is always forward, never back.
Other Quotes:
I think being a woman is like being Irish… Everyone says you’re important and nice, but you take second place all the time.
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.Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.
Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
