Quotes from Muriel Spark

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.

Oh she says the inconceivable sorrow of it, those chairs piled up at night when you're sitting in a cafè. The last one left.

How do you know when you're in love?' she said. 'The traffic improves and the cost of living seems very low.

You don't know what it's like trying to eat enough to live on and at the same time avoid fats and carbohydrates.

I'm not saying anything against the Modern side. Modern and Classical, they are equal, and each provides for a function in life. You must make  your free choice. Not everyone is capable of a Classical education. You must make your choice quite freely.

But those of Miss Brodie's kind were great talkers and feminists and, like most feminists, talked to men as man?to?man. 

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.

I think she's too ignorant to be a witch.

Sandwiches,' she said, 'like diamonds, are forever.

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.

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.

after thirty years' hostile fellowship with Collie, of course she did quite well understand that collie had a habit of skipping several stages in the logical sequence of her thoughts and would utter apparently disconnected statements, especially when confused by unfamiliar subject or the presence of a man

You can lie awake at night and think; the quality of insomnia depends entirely on what you decide to think of. Can you decide to think? - Yes, you can.

Back in 1944 when people were normal and there was a world war on,' says Paul to his son, 'it was a serious thing to be a spy.

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.

Her lips are slightly parted: she, whose lips are usually pressed together with the daily disapprovals of the accountants' office where she has worked continually, except for the months of illness, since she was 18, that is to say, for 16 years and some months. Her lips, when she does not speak or eat, are normally pressed together like the ruled line of a balance sheet, marked straight with her old-fashioned lipstick, a final and judjing mouth, a precision instrument.

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.

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.

I am putting old heads on your young shoulders,' Miss Brodie had told them at the time.

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)

She did not know then that the price of allowing false opinions was the gradual loss of one's capacity for forming true ones.

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.

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.

Do you know, Sandy dear, all my ambitions are for you and Rose. You have got insight, perhaps not quite spiritual, but you're a deep one, and Rose has got instinct.' 'Perhaps not quite spiritual' said Sandy. 'Yes,' said Miss Brodie, 'you're right. Rose has got a future by virtue of her instinct.' ... 'I ought to know because my prime has brought me instinct and insight, both.