Muriel Spark

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.

— Muriel Spark

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

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.

— Muriel Spark

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.

— Muriel Spark

Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life.

— Muriel Spark

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

— Muriel Spark

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.

— Muriel Spark

One should only see a psychiatrist out of boredom.

— Muriel Spark

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

Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of life ….

— Muriel Spark

A house in which there are no people—but with all the signs of tenancy—can be a most tranquil good place.

— Muriel Spark

Her parents had searched through the past, consulted psychiatrists, took every moment to bits. In no way should she be explained.

— Muriel Spark