Muriel Spark

"The one certain way for a woman to hold a man is to leave him for religion."

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

"A life like mine annoys most people; they go to their jobs every day, attend to things, give orders, pummel typewriters, and get two or three weeks off every year, and it vexes them to see someone else not bothering to do these things and yet getting away with it, not starving, being lucky as they call it."

"It is impossible to repent of love. The sin of love does not exist."

"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."

"I am putting old heads on your young shoulders," Miss Brodie had told them at that time, "and all my pupils are the crème de la crème."

"One's prime is elusive. You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognise your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur. You must then live it to the full."

"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."

"Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity."

"She writes well and concisely, and this has tended to obscure the psychological superficiality and sheer petty malice of her content."