Muriel Spark

"If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work ... the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk lamp ... The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, very mysterious."

"The word education comes from the root e from ex, out, and duco, I lead. It means a leading out. To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul."

"To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul."

"It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree, but smiles."

"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."

"When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality."

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

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

"It is a good thing to go to Paris for a few days if you have had a lot of trouble, and that is my advice to everyone except Parisians."

"Be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur."

"It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree but smiles."

"To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul."

"[Being in love] is something like poetry. Certainly you can analyze it and expound its various senses and intentions but there is always something left over mysteriously hovering between music and meaning."

"you're quite wrong there, Collie. One does miss sex. The body has a life of it's own. We do miss what we haven't had, you and I. Biologically. Ask Sigmund Freud. It is revealed in dreams. The absent touch of warm limbs at night, the absent"

"I often wonder if we were all characters in one of God's dreams."