Muriel Spark
18 quotes
Biography
Dame Muriel Sarah Spark was a Scottish novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist.
"It is impossible to repent of love. The sin of love does not exist."
"Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of life, that's their order of importance."
"To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul."
"The word "education"comes from the root e from ex, out, and duco, I lead. It means a leading out. To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul."
"For those who like that sort of thing,"said Miss Brodie in her best Edinburgh voice, "That is the sort of thing they like."
"The one certain way for a woman to hold a man is to leave him for religion."
"A life like mine annoys most people; they go to their jobs every day, attend to things, give orders, pummel typewriters, and get two or three weeks off every year, and it vexes them to see someone else not bothering to do these things and yet getting away with it, not starving, being lucky as they call it."
"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."
"I am putting old heads on your young shoulders," Miss Brodie had told them at that time, "and all my pupils are the crème de la crème."
"One's prime is elusive. You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognise your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur. You must then live it to the full."
"It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree, but smiles."
"She writes well and concisely, and this has tended to obscure the psychological superficiality and sheer petty malice of her content."
"When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality."
"I often wonder if we were all characters in one of God's dreams."
"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"
"[Being in love] is something like poetry. Certainly you can analyze it and expound its various senses and intentions but there is always something left over mysteriously hovering between music and meaning."
"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."
"It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree but smiles."