Top 80 Muriel Spark Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “I have a great desire to make people smile – not laugh. Laughter is too aggressive. People bare their teeth.”

— Muriel Spark

52. “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

53. “The more religious people are, the more perplexing I find them.”

— Muriel Spark

54. “Remember you must die.”

— Muriel Spark

55. “I don’t know why I thought of Dottie as my friend but I did. I believe she thought the same way about me although she really didn’t like me. In those days, among the people I mixed with, one had friends almost by predestination. There they were, like your winter coat and your meagre luggage. You didn’t think of discarding them just because you didn’t altogether like them.”

— Muriel Spark

56. “If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practise which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by 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

57. “To put it squarely, as I say in my memoir, the eternal triangle has come full circle.”

— Muriel Spark

58. “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

59. “However, as soon as Mrs. Hogg stepped into her room she disappeared, she simply disappeared. She had no private life whatsoever. God knows where she went in her privacy.”

— Muriel Spark

60. “It is not because we are rats that we tend to abandon people who are down, it is because we are embarrassed.”

— Muriel Spark

61. “I was just as anxious to prevent injustice as to cause justice.”

— Muriel Spark

62. “I think she’s too ignorant to be a witch.”

— Muriel Spark

63. “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

64. “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

65. “Contradictions in human character are one of its most consistent notes...”

— Muriel Spark

66. “Neurotics are awfully quick to notice other people’s mentalities...”

— Muriel Spark

67. “At that time many of the men looked like Rupert Brooke, whose portrait still hung in everyone’s imagination.”

— Muriel Spark

68. “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

69. “Nothing can be more puritanical in application than the virtues.”

— Muriel Spark

70. “I am putting old heads on your young shoulders,′ Miss Brodie had told them at the time.”

— Muriel Spark

71. “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

72. “It astonished me later to find how the readers found Warrender’s war record so convincing and full when I had said so little – one real war veteran of Burma wrote to say how realistic he found it – but since then I’ve come to learn for myself how little one needs, in the art of writing, to convey the lot, and how a lot of words, on the other hand, can convey so little.”

— Muriel Spark

73. “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

74. “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

75. “The one certain way for a woman to hold a man is to leave him for religion.”

— Muriel Spark

76. “I wouldn’t take the Pope too seriously. He’s a Pole first, a pope second, and maybe a Christian third.”

— Muriel Spark

77. “Being dead’s a drug’, he says, ’you’ll get hooked on it.”

— Muriel Spark

78. “Interviews can be stimulating. It depends on the intelligence of the interviewer.”

— Muriel Spark

79. “I have long wanted to know the Greek language, and this scheme will also serve to impress your knowledge on your own minds. John Stuart Mill used to rise at dawn to learn Greek at the age of five, and what John Stuart Mill could do as an infant at dawn, I too can do on a Saturday afternoon in my prime.”

— Muriel Spark

80. “There was a wonderful sunset across the distant sky, reflected in the sea, streaked with blood and puffed with avenging purple and gold as if the end of the world had come without intruding on every-day life.”

— Muriel Spark

81. “Miss Brodie liked to take her leisure over the unfolding of her plans, most of her joy deriving from the preparation.”

— Muriel Spark

82. “We all appear to ourselves frustrated in our old age... because we cling to everything so much. But in reality we are still fulfilling our lives.”

— Muriel Spark

83. “Her name and memory, after her death, flitted from mouth to mouth like swallows in summer, and in the winter they were gone.”

— Muriel Spark

84. “Mona Lisa in her prime smiled in steady composure even though she had just come from the dentist and her lower jaw was swollen.”

— Muriel Spark

85. “I have frequently told you, and the holidays just past have convinced me, that my prime has truly begun. 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.”

— Muriel Spark

86. “I am pleased that you are so fully convinced of my candour, for to know that you suspected me of a deficiency in this virtue would grieve and mortify me beyond expression. I do not derive any merit from the possession of it, for in me it is constitutional. Yet I think where it is possessed it will rarely exist alone, and where it is wanted there is reason to doubt the existence of almost every other virtue.”

— Muriel Spark

87. “If anyone comes along,” said Miss Brodie, “in the course of the following lesson, remember that it is the hour for English grammar. Meantime I will tell you a little of my life when I was younger than I am now, though six years older than the man himself.”

— Muriel Spark

88. “In this oblique way, she began to sense what went to the makings of Miss Brodie who had elected herself to grace in so particular a way and with more exotic suicidal enchantment than if she had simply taken to drink like other spinsters who couldn’t stand it any more.”

— Muriel Spark

89. “Arrogance is incurable.”

— Muriel Spark