Muriel Spark quotes

" Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life. " # Parents and Parenting # Children # Learning

" All my pupils are the crme de la crme. Give me a girl of an impressionable age, and she is mine for life. " # America # Age and Aging # Teachers and Teaching

" One's prime is elusive. You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur. You must then live it to the full. " # Potential # Life and Living # Age and Aging

" One should only see a psychiatrist out of boredom. " # Psychiatry

" 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. There is no other practice 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. " # Death and Dying # Habit # Life and Living

" 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. " # Education # Teachers and Teaching # Power

" Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as on a battlefield. " # Age and Aging # Freedom # Power

" I wouldn't take the Pope too seriously. He's a Pole first, a pope second, and maybe a Christian third. " # Pope # Christians and Christianity # Misers and Misery

" 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. " # Catholicism # Christians and Christianity # Love

" 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. " # Cities and City Life # Mind # Love