Top 94 Muriel Spark Quotes

#1. Frankness is usually a euphemism for rudeness.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #5976
#2. Phrases like 'the team spirit' are always employed to cut across individualism, love and personal loyalties.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #20892
#3. But you won't be able to pin her down on sex. Have you thought of politics?

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #23243
#4. Ridicule is the only honorable weapon we have left.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #64347
#5. When people say that nothing happens in their lives I believe them. But you must understand that everything happens to an artist; time is always redeemed, nothing is lost and wonders never cease.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #87702
#6. I'm old-fashioned beyond my years.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #90144
#7. It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree but smiles.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #109535
#8. It was a gusty day, and from the windows of Caroline's top-floor flat, only the sky was visible with its little hurrying clouds. It was a day when being indoors was meaningful, wasting an afternoon in superior confidences with a friend before the two-barred electric heater.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #114032
#9. Godfrey's wife Charmian sat with her eyes closed, attempting to put her thoughts into alphabetical order which Godfrey had told her was better than no order at all, since she now had grasp of neither logic nor chronology.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #146926
#10. We often laughed at others in our house, and I picked up the craft of being polite while people were present and laughing later if there was anything to laugh about.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #153437
#11. The Brodie set did not for a moment doubt that she would prevail. As soon expect Julius Caesar to apply for a job at a crank school as Miss Brodie. She would never resign. If the authorities wanted to get rid of her she would have to be assassinated.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #180912
#12. Final perseverance is the doctrine that wins the eternal victory in small things as in great

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #226238
#13. A work of art is like living people.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #227264
#14. Saving and pinching to get married, you're losing the best time of your life.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #229350
#15. Let us run up debts. One is nobody without debts.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #240526
#16. I never trust the airlines from those countries where the pilots believe in the afterlife. You are safer when they don't.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #256603
#17. 4:15. Not 4 not 4:30 but 4:15. She thought to intimidate me with the use of quarter hours.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #294484
#18. There was altogether too much candor in married life; it was an indelicate modern idea, and frequently led to upsets in a household, if not divorce ...

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #301539
#19. Fiction to me is a kind of parable. You have got to make up your mind it's not true. Some kind of truth emerges from it, but it's not fact.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #320857
#20. The words of the double-tongued are as if they were harmless, but they reach even to the inner part of the bowels. Praise be to the Lord, who distinguishes our cause and delivers us from the unjust and deceitful man.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #362034
#21. How do you know when you're in love?' she said.
'The traffic improves and the cost of living seems very low.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #388198
#22. It's a whydunnit in q-sharp major and it has a message: never talk to the sort of girls that you wouldn't leave lying about in your drawing-room for the servants to pick up.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #394537
#23. So great was the noise during the day that I used to lie awake at night listening to silence.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #408695
#24. People who quoted the Scriptures in criticism of others were terrible bores and usually they misapplied the text. One could prove anything against anyone from the Bible.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #426754
#25. These things happen in threes,' said Milly in her way of uttering bits of folk-wisdom; she was spooning tea into the heated teapot. She always mixed tea with maxims.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #463851
#26. The sacrifice of pleasures is of course itself a pleasure.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #482875
#27. Try as i do, i can't recall her surname. Indeed, her very abstractedness and insubstantial personality seemed to say 'forget me'; she seemed to live in parenthesis; ...

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #505665
#28. Never apologise, never explain.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #562173
#29. Beware the ire of the calm.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #616595
#30. You look for one thing and you find another.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #621663
#31. The true novelist is one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker, and the wonder of the art resides in the endless different ways of telling a story.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #654613
#32. Beware of men bearing flowers.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #667056
#33. Looking forward to going home, I was necessarily looking backward.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #685228
#34. Contradictions in human character are one of its most consistent notes ...

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #697918
#35. Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of life, that's their order of importance.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #702269
#36. The sparkle and morning-freshness of the shop, and the butter-conjuring girl, formed a mind-picture which accompanied the whole of my youth.(about the Buttercup Dairy)

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #724474
#37. Remember you must die.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #749841
#38. Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #754178
#39. No medicine man these days can afford to be without a portable tape recorder. Without the aid of this modern device, which may be easily concealed in the undergrowth of the jungle, the old tribal authority will rapidly become undermined by the mounting influenece of modern skepticism.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #787220
#40. You're quite wrong there, Collie. One does miss sex. The body has a life of it's own. We do miss what we haven't had, you and I. Biologically. Ask Sigmund Freud. It is revealed in dreams. The absent touch of warm limbs at night, the absent

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #815110
#41. One should only see a psychiatrist out of boredom.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #822240
#42. If you're going to do a thing, you should do it thoroughly. If you're going to be a Christian, you may as well be a Catholic.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #845907
#43. It never really occurred to her that literary men, if they like women at all, do not want literary women but girls.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #846721
#44. If you choose the sort of life which has no conventional pattern you have to try to make an art of it, or it is a mess.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #855355
#45. [...] there were other people's Edinburghs quite different from hers [...]

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #855388
#46. Neurotics are awfully quick to notice other people's mentalities ...

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #878138
#47. No mind should submit their mind to another mind He that complies against his will is of his own opinion still
that's my motto. I won't be brainwashed.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #885596
#48. Being in love is something like poetry. Certainly, you can analyze and expound its various senses and intentions, but there is always something left over, mysteriously hovering between music and meaning.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #904798
#49. Hildegard had long felt that sentimentality was a luxury she could not afford.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #916071
#50. New York, home of the vivisectors of the mind, and of the mentally vivisected still to be reassembled, of those who live intact, habitually wondering about their states of sanity, and home of those whose minds have been dead, bearing the scars of resurrection.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #928695
#51. To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #945470
#52. Sandwiches,' she said, 'like diamonds, are forever.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #957687
#53. The one certain way for a woman to hold a man is to leave him for religion.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1008916
#54. I am a hoarder of two things: documents and trusted friends.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1037765
#55. Sex is all right" he says
"It's all right at the time, and it's all right before" says Lise, "but the problem is afterwards. That is, if you're not an animal. Most of the time, afterwards is pretty sad.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1070880
#56. Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1073875
#57. I used to think it a pity that her mother rather than she had not thought of birth control.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1113344
#58. I have a great desire to make people smile - not laugh. Laughter is too aggressive. People bare their teeth.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1149035
#59. Miss Brodie was easily the equal of both sisters together, she was the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle and they were only the squares on the other two sides.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1178781
#60. Be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1199144
#61. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1208285
#62. Nothing can be more puritanical in application than the virtues.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1224747
#63. Sooner or later I do what I want to do.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1253420
#64. A rebellion against a tyrant is only immoral when it hasn't got a chance.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1269608
#65. You can lie awake at night and think; the quality of insomnia depends entirely on what you decide to think of. Can you decide to think? - Yes, you can.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1305121
#66. At that time many of the men looked like Rupert Brooke, whose portrait still hung in everyone's imagination.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1308727
#67. Allow me, in conclusion, to congratulate you warmly upon your sexual intercourse, as well as your singing.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1332858
#68. Jealousy ... is an affliction of the spirit which, unlike some sins of the flesh, gives no one any pleasure.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1335312
#69. For those who like that sort of thing," said Miss Brodie in her best Edinburgh voice, "That is the sort of thing they like.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1343000
#70. How wonderful it feels to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century,

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1363554
#71. From my experience of life I believe my personal motto should be: 'Beware of any man bringing flowers.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1370939
#72. I am putting old heads on your young shoulders,' Miss Brodie had told them at the time.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1468817
#73. You don't know what it's like trying to eat enough to live on and at the same time avoid fats and carbohydrates.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1507602
#74. Goodness, Truth and Beauty come first

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1514209
#75. It is difficult for people of advanced years to start remembering they must die. It is best to form the habit while young.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1519810
#76. She wasn't a person to whom things happen. She did all the happenings.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1552987
#77. One's prime is elusive. You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur. You must then live it to the full.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1571738
#78. It is impossible to repent of love. The sin of love does not exist.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1573404
#79. It isn't necessarily the great and famous beauty spots we fall in love with. As with people, so with places. Love is unforeseen, and we can all find ourselves affectionately attached to the minor and the less obvious.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1597329
#80. Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and dying as on a battlefield.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1630368
#81. She did not know then that the price of allowing false opinions was the gradual loss of one's capacity for forming true ones.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1663273
#82. These years are still the years of my prime. It is important to recognise the years of one's prime, always remember that.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1663654
#83. To put it squarely, as I say in my memoir, the eternal triangle has come full circle.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1667207
#84. I often wonder if we were all characters in one of God's dreams.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1673599
#85. It is one of the secrets of Nature in its mood of mockery that fine weather lays heavier weight on the mind and hearts of the depressed and the inwardly tormented than does a really bad day with dark rain sniveling continuously and sympathetically from a dirty sky.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1682073
#86. I see no reason to keep silent about my enjoyment of the sound of my own voice as I work.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1702398
#87. Flattening their scorn underneath the chariot wheels of her superiority.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1711266
#88. It is a good thing to go to Paris for a few days if you have had a lot of trouble, and that is my advice to everyone except Parisians.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1757228
#89. I wouldn't take the Pope too seriously. He's a Pole first, a pope second, and maybe a Christian third.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1767360
#90. He turns a page of his newspaper and folds it conveniently for reading, and reads it without looking at her again, settling further into his seat with the slight sigh of one whose visitor has left and who is at last alone.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1777918
#91. I was just as anxious to prevent injustice as to cause justice.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1790736
#92. Interviews can be stimulating. It depends on the intelligence of the interviewer.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1804487
#93. We have invented sex guilt to take our minds off the real thing.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1812344
#94. It is well, when in difficulties, to say never a word, neither black nor white. Speech is silver but silence is golden.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes #1855175

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