Muriel Spark Quotes

“remember you must live.
remember you most love.
remainder you mist leaf.”
― Ali Smith, Hotel World

“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)”
― Muriel Spark, Curriculum Vitae: Autobiography

“If I had my life over again, I would form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice 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. You might as well drink Kool-Aid”
― Steven Salaita

“He sincerely believed that talent, although not equally distributed by nature, could be later conferred by a title or acquired by inherited rank.”
― Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent

“I suspect he really believed that the Wedgwood cup from which he daintily sipped his tea derived its value from the fact that the social system had recognized the Wedgwood family, not from the china that they had exerted themselves to make.”
― Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent