Ivy Compton-Burnett Quotations

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

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

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

Time 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.

There is more difference within the sexes than between them.

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

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

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

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

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

People have never lost what they think they have.

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

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

Never is a long word.

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

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

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

Magnifying a matter is not the way to mend 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.

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!

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

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.

some people always have a touch of youth about them.

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 are always children to our mothers.

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.

To young people the future is still long.

Civilized life exacts its toll.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

The most original novelist now writing in English.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Real life seems to have no plots.

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