Ivy Compton-Burnett Quotes

53 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Ivy Compton-Burnett
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.

Ivy Compton-Burnett
Many people misjudge the permanent effect of sorrow, and their capacity to live in the past. And it is not a course to be wished for them.

Ivy Compton-Burnett
There is more difference within the sexes than between them.

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

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

Ivy Compton-Burnett
What concerns anyone so much as the time he has to live?

Ivy Compton-Burnett
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.

Ivy Compton-Burnett
'She still seems to me in her own way a person born to command,' said Luce... 'I wonder if anyone is born to obey,' said Isabel. 'That may be why people command rather badly, that they have no suitable material to work on.'

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

Ivy Compton-Burnett
Well, the English have no family feelings. That is, none of the kind you mean. They have them, and one of them is that relations must cause no expense.

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

Ivy Compton-Burnett
Real charity and a 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.

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

Ivy Compton-Burnett
'I don't know that I know much of the subject,' said Fulbert, with a suggestion that further knowledge would hardly add to him.

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

Ivy Compton-Burnett
That is the worst of kindness; people take advantage of it.

Ivy Compton-Burnett
Our desires have a way of getting bigger with our incomes.

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

Ivy Compton-Burnett
I am ill at ease with people whose lives are an open book.

Ivy Compton-Burnett
Ah, we have to be generous to be grateful.... One has oneself to be a giver.

Ivy Compton-Burnett
It is no good to think that other people are out to serve our interests.

Ivy Compton-Burnett