Ivy Compton-Burnett Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

As regards plot I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots. And as I think a plot desirable and almost necessary, I have this extra grudge against life.

Real life seems to have no plots.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I die, people will say it is the best thing for me. It is because they know it is the worst. They want to avoid the feeling of pity. As though they were the people most concerned!

The most original novelist now writing in English.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 are always children to our mothers.

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

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

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

It is not for us to hold ourselves above the position of grateful people. We have to be able to accept. Anything else shows an unwillingness to grant someone else the superior place.

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

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

Real charity and real ability never to condemn-the one real virtue-is so often the result of a waking experience that gives a glimpse of what lies beneath things.

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

Never is a long word.

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

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

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.

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

Magnifying a matter is not the way to mend it.

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

some people always have a touch of youth about them.

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

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

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

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

People have never lost what they think they have.

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

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