Ivy Compton-Burnett quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Ivy Compton-Burnett

Ivy Compton-Burnett Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Ivy Compton-Burnett on Wise Famous Quotes.

We must use words as they are used, or stand aside from life.

Many people misjudge the permanent effect of sorrow, and their capacity to live in the past.

At a certain point my novels set. They set just as hard as that jam jar. And then I know they are finished.

I never know why self-sacrifice is noble. Why is it better to sacrifice oneself than someone else?

There is probably nothing like living together for blinding people to each other.

There are different kinds of wrong. The people sinned against are not always the best.

It is so subtle to write things that have no meaning

A leopard does not change his spots, or change his feeling that spots are rather a credit.

Everything is breaking stones, up to a point.

Pushing forty? She's hanging on for dear life.

It is in our minds that we live much of our life.

People who have power respond simply. They have no minds but their own.

We do not discuss the members of our family to their faces ...

Anyone who picks up a Compton-Burnett finds it very hard not to put it down.

Our desires have a way of getting bigger with our incomes.

A plot is like the bones of a person, not interesting like expression, or signs of experience, but the support of the whole.

The wrong is never the only thing a wrong-doer has done.

It will be a beautiful family talk, mean and worried and full of sorrow and spite and excitement.

Some people always have a touch of youth about them.

What concerns anyone so much as the time he has to live?

Parents have too little respect for their children, just as the children have too much for the parents.

Duty is seldom liked either by the doer or the object ... And why should it be? It is not often of advantage to either.

Magnifying a matter is not the way to mend it.

There isn't much to say. I haven't been at all deedy.

Well, of course, people are only human ... But it really does not seem much for them to be.

The plot is not very important to me, though a novel must have one, of course. It's just a line to hang the washing on.

We none of us talk to people as we do behind their backs.

...poets generally write as if they were dead.

You should not want to know the things in people's minds. If you were meant to hear them, they would be said.

As regards plots I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots.

Dear, dear, the miniature world of the family! All the emotions of mankind seem to find a place in it.

Charm should be on the surface. It has no hidden use.

It is no good to think that other people are out to serve our interests.

Truth is so impossible. Something has to be done for it.

Real life seems to have no plots.

People do not like to lose their lives. That is the reason why they should not take other people's.

Civilized life exacts its toll.

Never is a long word.

I think I feel on the whole that something's there trying to get out ... It's sort of trying to get out and wants help.

[On writing:] What a difficult kind of work to choose! But of course one did not choose it. There was no choice.

We are always children to our mothers.

I wonder the human race has been so fond of migrations, when the young take so hardly to traveling ...

It is better to be drunk with loss and to beat the ground, than to let the deeper things gradually escape.

The most original novelist now writing in English.

People have never lost what they think they have.

Ah, we have to be generous to be grateful ... One has oneself to be a giver.

A person who can really be called an unselfish person, has no place in life.

To young people the future is still long.

Appearances are not held to be a clue to the truth,' said his cousin. 'But we seem to have no other.

I am ill at ease with people whose lives are an open book.

If I were not a child with my parents, they would be more unloving toward me ...

People's weaker side is not necessarily their truer self.

We can build upon foundations anywhere if they are well and firmly laid.

My youth is escaping without giving me anything it owes me.

There is more difference within the sexes than between them.

There is danger in courage. Cowardice is a power for good. We hardly know what it prevents.