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Muriel Spark Quotes
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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
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Since the story of my own life is just as much constituted of the secrets of my craft as it is of other events, I might as well remark here that to make a character ring true it needs must be in some way contradictory, somewhere a paradox.
Muriel Spark
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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.
Muriel Spark
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If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. No other practice so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one -surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death, life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.
Muriel Spark
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Nothing can be more puritanical in application than the virtues.
Muriel Spark
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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
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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
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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
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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
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It was one thing to applaud justice, another to bring it about.
Muriel Spark
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Looking forward to going home, I was necessarily looking backward.
Muriel Spark
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I was just as anxious to prevent injustice as to cause justice.
Muriel Spark
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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
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[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
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A rebellion against a tyrant is only immoral when it hasn't got a chance.
Muriel Spark
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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
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We have invented sex guilt to take our minds off the real thing.
Muriel Spark
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Oh, the trifles, the people, that get on your nerves when you have a neurosis!
Muriel Spark
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'Invariably, a man you feed both ends,' Gertrude says. 'You have to learn to cook and to do the other.'
Muriel Spark
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How wonderful it feels to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century,
Muriel Spark
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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
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Jealousy... is an affliction of the spirit which, unlike some sins of the flesh, gives no one any pleasure.
Muriel Spark
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Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.
Muriel Spark
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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.
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It never really occurred to her that literary men, if they like women at all, do not want literary women but girls.
Muriel Spark
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Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Muriel Spark
Wikipedia
Born:
February 1, 1918
Died:
April 13, 2006
(aged 88)
Bio:
Dame Muriel Sarah Spark, CLit was a Scottish novelist. In 2008, the Times newspaper named Spark as No. 8 in its list of 'the 50 greatest British writers since 1945'.
Known for:
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
The Driver's Seat (1970)
The Girls of Slender Means (1963)
Memento Mori (1959)
Loitering with Intent (1981)
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