Muriel Spark Quotes

62 Sourced Quotes

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
The letters of famous people can be placed into two categories: there is the type of letter which becomes itself a valuable contribution to literature through its wit, style or wisdom; another kind is that whose main importance lies in the provision of a background to their author's life. Especially in the correspondence of great writers and poets, these two factors are very often combined...

Muriel Spark
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
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
It was one thing to applaud justice, another to bring it about.

Muriel Spark
Looking forward to going home, I was necessarily looking backward.

Muriel Spark
I was just as anxious to prevent injustice as to cause justice.

Muriel Spark
To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education, I call it intrusion.

Muriel Spark
[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.

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

Muriel Spark
Tom often wondered if we were all characters in one of God's dreams. To an unbeliever this would have meant the casting of an insubstantiality within an already insubstantial context. Tom was a believer.

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

Muriel Spark
Oh, the trifles, the people, that get on your nerves when you have a neurosis!

Muriel Spark
'Invariably, a man you feed both ends,' Gertrude says. 'You have to learn to cook and to do the other.'

Muriel Spark
How wonderful it feels to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century,

Muriel Spark
Someone at the table, whose order had not yet arrived, said, 'I think waiter is such a funny word. It is we who wait.'

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

Muriel Spark
Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.

Muriel Spark
Outwardly she differed from the rest of the teaching staff in that she was still in a state of fluctuating development, whereas they had only too understandably not trusted themselves to change their minds, particularly on ethical questions, after the age of twenty.

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

Muriel Spark
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
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
Her parents had searched through the past, consulted psychiatrists, took every moment to bits. In no way could she be explained.

Muriel Spark
I have a great desire to make people smile — not laugh. Laughter is too aggressive. People bare their teeth.

Muriel Spark
We often laughed at others in our house, and I picked up the craft of being polite while people were present and laughing later.

Muriel Spark
Ben was an intellectual, and intellectuals, say what you like, seemed to last longer than anyone else.

Muriel Spark
For those who like that sort of thing... that is the sort of thing they like.

Muriel Spark
It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree, but smiles.

Muriel Spark
You are writing to a friend. Write privately, not publicly, without fear or timidity, right to the end of the letter, as if it was never going to be published... Don't rehearse too much, the story will develop as you go along... Remember not to think of the reading public. It will put you off.

Muriel Spark
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