Muriel Spark Quotes

I've been running from, and toward, death all my life, more aware of it than a person should be.

Everyone knows they re going to die,' he said again, 'but nobody believes it. If we did, we would do things differently.

Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one's life!

If we ignore our death, we end up just going around completely oblivious to why we do the things we do!

Do not fear death so much but rather the inadequate life.

People living deeply have no fear of death.

The acceptance of death gives you more of a stake in life, in living life happily, as it should be lived. Living for the moment.

If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, 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.

Just where death is expecting you is something we cannot know; so, for your part, expect him everywhere.

If death is in the room, it's pretty interesting. But I would also say that I'm interested in getting myself to believe that it's going to happen to me. I'm interested in it, because if you're not, you're nuts. It's really de facto what we're here to find out about.

It doesn't take that many years for a kid to realise that they're going to die. It's always there in the back of their mind the rest of their lives.

Don't be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.

Death? Why this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.

I hope I am not too repetitive. However, coming to terms with death is part of the general human situation.

In your teens and twenties, death doesn't exist. In your thirties, you glance down the road occasionally. But then in your forties, it becomes a full-time job looking the other way.

Death never takes the wise man by surprise, he is always ready to go.

There's not a higher stake than someone having to face their own death.

Woe, woe, woe... in a little while we shall all be dead. Therefore let us behave as though we were dead already.

Those who learned to know death, rather than to fear and fight it, become our teachers about life.

Between my head and my hand, there is always the face of death.

We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.

The subject of death is taboo. We feel, perhaps only subconsciously, that to be in contact with death in any way, even indirectly, somehow confronts us with the prospect of our own deaths, draws our own deaths closer and makes them more real and thinkable.

We tend to talk about death as if it is losing a battle, but that assumes living is winning and dying is not.

I'm not afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens.

It is true that you can say that death is natural, but it is also natural to fight death. But if you stand up and say this is a big problem, we should do something about this, that makes people very uncomfortable, because they've made their peace with death.