Happy birthday, Iris Murdoch! A few words from her about happiness…

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iris-murdoch-1Two quotes today, because I couldn’t decide. You choose:

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

and this one:

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

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— Dame Iris Murdoch, born on this date in 1919

birthday cake

 

 

 

 

Author: Cynthia Haven

Cynthia Haven has written for The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, World Literature Today, and other publications. Her work has also appeared in Le Monde, La Repubblica, The Kenyon Review, Quarterly Conversation, The Georgia Review, Civilization, and others. She has been a Milena Jesenská Journalism Fellow with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. Peter Dale in Conversation with Cynthia Haven was published in London, 2005. Her Czestaw Mitosz: Conversations was published in 2006; Joseph Brodsky: Conversations in 2003; An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czestaw Mitosz was published in 2011 with Ohio University Press / Swallow Press. She is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford. Her biography René Girard, A Life will be published next year. Join me at twitter: @chaven

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