Best 44 quotes of Ivy Compton-burnett on MyQuotes

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I never agree with the compliments paid to it. It is not a great healer. It is an indifferent and perfunctory one. Sometimes it does not heal at all. And sometimes when it seems to, no healing has been necessary.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Magnifying a matter is not the way to mend it.

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

Most of the pleasure of making a book would go if it held nothing to be shared by other people. I would write for a few dozen people, and sometimes it seems that I do so, but I would not write for no-one.

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

Never is a long word.

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

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

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.

Real life seems to have no plots.

The most original novelist now writing in English.

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.

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

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

There is more difference within the sexes than between them.

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

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

Well, Buttermere, this is a day that is good to live and breathe in, that makes a man feel in his prime. Standing here in front of my house, I feel as young as when I moved into it thirty years ago, in the year eighteen hundred and fifty-nine. What aged man would you take me to be, as I step as it were casually into your view?

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

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

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!

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. And as I think a plot desirable and almost necessary, I have this extra grudge against real life. But I think there are signs that strange things happen, though they do not emerge

Speaking of things robs them of half their terrors.

Things only ferment and fester in the dark.