Quotes from Muriel Spark

Good mawning,' she replied, in the corridors, flattening their scorn beneath the chariot wheels of her superiority...

This deadly body of mine can dance, too.

We are not all born heroes and athletes. At the same time it is elementary wisdom always to fear weaknesses, including one's own; the reactions of the weak, when touched off, can be horrible and sudden.

Milly's narrative skill was considerable... she brought a scene to life by a chance descriptive detail in the right place and by that graphic and right placing of words which most of the Irish excel at. She had no Irish blarney, she never exaggerated. I could listen to Milly for hours.

I had a sense he was offering things abominable to me, like decaffeinated coffee or coitus interruptus

there were other people's Edinburghs quite different from hers [...]

There were legions of her kind during the nineteen-thirties, women from the age of thirty and upward, who crowded into their war-bereaved spinsterhood with voyages of discovery into new ideas and energetic practices in art and social welfare, education or religion.

On the first day of his holiday Laurence Manders woke to hear his grandmother's voice below. 'I'll have a large wholemeal. I've got my grandson stopping for a week, who's on the BBC. That's my daughter's boy, Lady Manders. He won't eat white bread, one of his fads.' Laurence shouted from the window, 'Grandmother, I adore white bread and I have no fads.

It was then that Miss Brodie looked beautiful and fragile, just as dark, heavy Edinburgh itself could suddenly be changed into a floating city when the light was a special pearly white and fell upon one of the gracefully fashioned streets. In the same way Miss Brodie's masterful features became clear and sweet to Sandy when viewed in the curious light of the woman's folly, and she never felt more affection for her in her later years than when she thought upon Miss Brodie silly.

I also went to London to see life, for it was my ambition to write about life, which first I had to see.

When I failed again and again to reproduce life in some satisfactory and perfect form, I was the more imprisoned, for all my carefree living, within my craving for this satisfaction.

poetry which she loved rather as it might be assumed a cat loves birds; poetry, especially the declamatory sort, excited and possessed her; she would pounce on the stuff, play with it quivering in her mind

These things happen in threes,' said Milly in her way of uttering bits of folk-wisdom; she was spooning tea into the heated teapot. She always mixed tea with maxims.

The nerve of the woman,' said Milly, 'to commit suicide from my house!

And the name of the party,' Abigail was saying in her description of one of the founders of the Highgate Review, is Howard Send. Too killing. I called him Passage to India, he was amazed. Of course he's that way, but they often make better friends.

But you won't be able to pin her down on sex. Have you thought of politics?

I offer this advice without fee; it is included in the price of this book.

Connie's other job was proof-editing which she did very badly. Transferring the author's corrections to a clean sheet of proofs was something Connie was unable to do without missing an average of three corrections a page, or transcribing newly inserted material all wrong... she put angry authors' letters about the mutilation of their books under the cushion of her chair to deal with later

[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.

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.

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

Beware of men bearing flowers.

If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat . . .

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