Top 100 Muriel's Quotes
#1. There is silence and then the familiar smack of Beatrice Muriel's palm against her forehead. "A love marriage," she says. In her opinion, love marriages border on the indecent. They signify a breakdown of propriety, a giving in to the base instincts exhibited by the lower castes and foreigners.
Nayomi Munaweera
#2. Hello," Newel said. "Look, Doren, we have visitors. Kendra, Seth, and ... Muriel's weirdo puppet." ... Newel grabbed Seth's hand and shook it vigorously. "Congratulations. You just found yourself a secret entrance."
"So seriously," Doren said. "What's with the puppet?
Brandon Mull
#3. I also love Australian movies. I love Muriel's Wedding - I've seen in six times. Baz Luhrmann's best movie is strictly ballroom ... without question.
Ridley Scott
#4. At that time many of the men looked like Rupert Brooke, whose portrait still hung in everyone's imagination.
Muriel Spark
#5. It is always reassuring to be disabused of one's own paranoia.
Muriel Barbery
#6. That is the way a summer rain can take hold in you- like a new heart, beating in time with another's.
Muriel Barbery
#7. While you don't need a formal written contract before you get married, I think it's important for both partners to spell out what they expect from each other ... There are always plenty of surprises- and lots of give and take-once you're married.
Muriel Fox
#8. Oh, and I have to mention one lady who does all of my book covers in cross stitch and frames them. Muriel. She's amazing. I just received one for my latest, Love And Dr Devon, actually. It's very sweet of her to do it.
Alan Titchmarsh
#9. Dear Emily, This week I went to the library. I got Black Beauty. It is about a horse. It is the best book I ever read. I read it three times. I have to go now. Write soon. Yours truly, Muriel. P.S. Mama sends her love.
Beverly Cleary
#10. 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
#11. How distressing to stumble on a dominant social habitus, just when one was convinced of one's own uniqueness in the matter!
Muriel Barbery
#12. As a child I often wondered whether I would be allowed to live such moments- to inhabit the slow, majestic ballet of the snowflakes, to be released at last from the dreary frenzy of time. Is that what it feels to be naked? All one's clothes are gone, yet one's mind is overladen with finery.
Muriel Barbery
#13. But women are coming into Wall Street in large numbers - and they still are not making partner and are not getting into the positions that lead to the executive suites. There's still an old-boy network. You just have to keep fighting.
Muriel Siebert
#14. No one seems to have thought of the fact that life is absurd, being a brilliant success has no greater value than being a failure. It's just more comfortable. And even then: I think lucidity gives your success a bitter taste, whereas mediocrity still leaves hope for something.
Muriel Barbery
#15. To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul.
Muriel Spark
#16. The raw tomato, devoured in the garden when freshly picked, is a horn of abundance of simple sensations, a radiating rush in one's mouth that brings with it every pleasure ... a tomato, an adventure.
Muriel Barbery
#17. Maybe that's what life's all about: there's a lof of despair, but also the odd moments of beauty, where time is no longer the same ... [like] something suspended ... an elsewhere ... an always within a never.
Yes, that's is, an always within a never.
Muriel Barbery
#18. Yes, my tiara sets off the whole thing nicely," said Auntie Muriel in a rather carrying whisper. "But I must say, Ginevra's dress is far too low-cut."
Ginny glanced round, grinning, winked at Harry, then quickly faced the front again.
J.K. Rowling
#19. A child who is happy on his pony's back has something which will be to him a glorious memory that the years cannot dim ...
Muriel Wace
#20. Papa is just a kid who's playing the dead serious grown-up.
Muriel Barbery
#21. Change of scene is the thing. I head of a man. Girl refused him. Man went abroad. Two months later girl wired him "Come back, Muriel." Man started to write out a reply; suddenly found that he couldn't remember girl's surname; so never answered at all, and lived happily ever after.
P.G. Wodehouse
#22. 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
#23. Neurotics are awfully quick to notice other people's mentalities ...
Muriel Spark
#24. [...] there were other people's Edinburghs quite different from hers [...]
Muriel Spark
#25. 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
#26. What is writing, no matter how lavish the pieces, if it says nothing of the truth, cares little for the heart, and is merely subservient to the pleasure of showing one's brilliance.
Muriel Barbery
#27. A terroir only exists by virtue of one's childhood mythology ... we have invented these words of tradition rooted deep in the land and identity of a region ... because we want to solidify and objectify the magical, bygone years that preceded the horror of becoming an adult.
Muriel Barbery
#28. What makes the strength of a soldier isn't the energy he uses trying to intimidate the other guy by sending him a whole lot of signals, it's the strength he's able to concentrate within himself, by staying centered.
Muriel Barbery
#29. He found and praised Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat. I said I found it too schematic and preferred The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. He nodded, but not in agreement, it seemed, more like a therapist who now understood my problem.
Ian McEwan
#30. Only one man lived who could understand Gibbs's papers. That was Maxwell, and now he is dead.
Muriel Rukeyser
#31. I wouldn't take the Pope too seriously. He's a Pole first, a pope second, and maybe a Christian third.
Muriel Spark
#32. Local images have one kind of reality. 'U.S. 1' will, I hope, have that kind and another, too. Poetry can extend the document.
Muriel Rukeyser
#33. There's something I've been wanting to say for a long time. I'm a liberal, and I'm proud of it. In fact, I was probably a little more liberal than Hubert was. I just wanted to say that.
Muriel Humphrey
#34. I often wonder if we were all characters in one of God's dreams.
Muriel Spark
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. I take the measure of the ridiculous, superfluous cats who wander through our lives with all the placidity and indifference of an imbecile are in fact the guardians of life's good and joyful moments, and of its happy web, even beneath the canopy of misfortune.
Muriel Barbery
#38. When someone that you love dies..it's like fireworks suddenly burning out in the sky and everything going black.
Muriel Barbery
#39. 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
#40. We have to live with the certainty that we'll get old and that it won't look nice or be good or feel happy. And tell ourselves that it's nowt hat matters: to build something, now, at any price, using all our strength.
Muriel Barbery
#41. If there is one thing I detest, it's when people transform their powerlessness or alienation into a creed.
Muriel Barbery
#42. 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
#43. William Faulkner, Muriel Spark, Richard Yates, William Styron, James Salter, Alice Munro. They're very different writers, and I admire them for different reasons. The common thread, I guess, is that they remind me what's possible, why I wanted to write fiction in the first place.
Jennifer Haigh
#44. So you're getting back together with her? Just like that? Muriel asks.
"Not 'just like that'..." "How then?" Muriel enjoys playing devil's advocate. "For starters, it will have to be long distance for a while..." She doesn't let up. "For a while? Have you booked the U-Haul already?
Harper Bliss
#45. Because beauty consits of it's own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their movement and their death.
Muriel Barbery
#46. A lasting marriage, they say, is one where the two reach for different sections of the Sunday paper. Me, I go right for the obituaries, just like those very elderly characters in Muriel Spark's spooky novel, 'Memento Mori.'
Billy Collins
#47. Maybe that's what being alive is about: so we can track down those movments that are dying.
Muriel Barbery
#48. I know that they're all unhappy because nobody loves the right person the way they should and because they don't understand that it's really their own self that they're mad at.
Muriel Barbery
#49. It's obvious that five days is just enough to give one a false impression of any country.
Muriel Lester
#50. Tasting is an act of pleasure, and writing about that pleasure is an artistic gesture, but the only true work of art, in the end, is another person's feast.
Muriel Barbery
#51. The universe is not made of atoms; it's made of stories.
Muriel Rukeyser
#52. Life has meaning and we grown-ups know what it is is the universal lie that everyone is supposed to believe. Once you become an adult and you realize that's not true, it's too late.
Muriel Barbery
#55. 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
#56. Once your eyes get opened to pacifism, you can't shut them again. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. You may bitterly regret the fact that you happen to be one of the tiny minority of the human race who have caught this angle of vision, but you can't help it.
Muriel Lester
#58. I think there is choice possible at any moment to us, as long as we live. But there is no sacrifice. There is a choice, and the rest falls away. Second choice does not exist. Beware of those who talk about sacrifice
Muriel Rukeyser
#59. The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects.
Muriel Barbery
#60. One characteristic of modern poetry is that arrangement of parts which strikes many people as being violent or obscure.
Muriel Rukeyser
#61. There was only one thing I wanted: to be left alone, without too many demand upon my person, so that for a few moments each day I might be allowed to assuage my hunger.
Muriel Barbery
#62. A teenager who pretends to be an adult is still a teenager. If you imagine that getting high at a party and sleeping around is going to propel you into a state of adulthood, that's like thinking that dressing up as an Indian is going to make you an Indian.
Muriel Barbery
#63. Ridicule is the only honorable weapon we have left.
Muriel Spark
#64. The lines gradually become their own demiurges and, like some witless yet miraculous participant, I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will and appear in spite of me on the sheet, teaching me something that I neither knew nor thought I might want to know.
Muriel Barbery
#66. it is hard to keep your feet on the earth while your heart looks for the heavens.
Muriel Maufroy
#67. In the end, I wonder if the true movement of the world might not be a voice raised in song.
Muriel Barbery
#68. But you won't be able to pin her down on sex. Have you thought of politics?
Muriel Spark
#69. I may know that the world is an ugly place, I still don't want to see it.
Muriel Barbery
#70. Phrases like 'the team spirit' are always employed to cut across individualism, love and personal loyalties.
Muriel Spark
#72. In any event, it's done, said Papa-which are the words of a coward to the power of ten.
Muriel Barbery
#73. In 2007, several musicologists contacted me at about the same time, expressing interest in the work of the mysterious Muriel Herbert, a few of whose songs they had come across.
Claire Tomalin
#74. Given is the word. Given publicly, on the first Good Friday, on a hill, in the sight of all, was the visible demonstration of the only permanent way to overcome evil. Human nature demands something more enduring than the unquiet equilibrium of rival powers.
Muriel Lester
#75. Frankness is usually a euphemism for rudeness.
Muriel Spark
#76. But the world, in its present state, is no place for princesses
Muriel Barbery
#77. In our world, that's the way you live your grown-up life: you must constantly rebuild your identity as an adult, the way it's been put together it is wobbly, ephemeral, and fragile, it cloaks despair and, when you're alone in front of the mirror, it tells you the lies you need to believe.
Muriel Barbery
#78. 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
#79. So if there is something on the planet that is worth living for, I'd better not miss it, because once you're dead, it's too late for regrets, and if you die by mistake, that is really, really dumb.
Muriel Barbery
#80. We never look beyond our assumptions and what's worse, we have given up trying to meet others; we just meet ourselves.
Muriel Barbery
#81. How to measure a life's worth? The important thing, said Paloma one day, is not the fact of dying, it is what you are doing in the moment of your death.
Muriel Barbery
#82. A victor's peace is usually vindictive and stirs up a passion for revenge a generation or so later.
Muriel Lester
#83. 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
#84. Entrusting one's life is not the same as opening up one's soul.
Muriel Barbery
#85. Literature, for example, serves a pragmatic purpose. Like any form of Art, literature's mission is to make the fulfillment of our essential duties more bearable.
Muriel Barbery
#86. 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
#87. People think that children don't know anything. It's enough to make you wonder if grownups were ever children once upon a time.
Muriel Barbery
#88. That's what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people. - The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Muriel Barbery
#89. God's gifts are often difficult to appreciate; nevertheless they are gifts.
Muriel Maufroy
#90. So that's what it's like? All of a sudden all possibility just vanishes? A life full of projects, discussions just started, desires not even fulfilled - it all vanishes in a second and there's nothing left, nothing left to do, and there's no going back?
Muriel Barbery
#91. I'm afraid to go into myself and see what's going on in there.
Muriel Barbery
#92. 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
#93. but it is the waiting that is unbearable, this suspension of time when something has not yet happened and where we feel how very useless it is to struggle
Muriel Barbery
#94. I will try to be non-violent
one more day
this morning, waking the world away
in the violent day.
Muriel Rukeyser
#95. Ici le fashion police. How can I enhance your fabulousness
Muriel Zagha
#96. 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
#97. In the partnership between ourselves and the horse there must be one ruling spirit, and that one must be the rider.
Muriel Wace
#98. It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree but smiles.
Muriel Spark
#100. The French are often, when it comes to wine, so formal that they border on the ridiculous.
Muriel Barbery
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
