Muriel Spark

“Six years previously, Miss Brodie had led her new class into the garden for a history lesson underneath the big elm. On the way through the school corridors they passed the headmistress's study. The door was wide open, the room was empty.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.”

“For those who like that sort of thing," said Miss Brodie in her best Edinburgh voice, "That is the sort of thing they like.”

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

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

“Being dead's a drug', he says, 'you'll get hooked on it.”

“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.”

“All my pupils are the creme de la creme. Give me a girl of an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.”