150 Quotes by Muriel Spark

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

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

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.

For those who like that sort of thing," said Miss Brodie in her best Edinburgh voice, "That is the sort of thing they like.

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.

Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.

I see no reason to keep silent about my enjoyment of the sound of my own voice as I work.

... flattening their scorn underneath the chariot wheels of her superiority.

Her words depressed him. They were like spilt sugar; however much you swept it up some grains would keep grinding under your feet.