1.
A leopard does not change his spots, or change his feeling that spots are rather a credit.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
2.
Anyone who picks up a Compton-Burnett finds it very hard not to put it down.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
3.
There are different kinds of wrong. The people sinned against are not always the best.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
4.
My youth is escaping without giving me anything it owes me.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
5.
We can build upon foundations anywhere if they are well and firmly laid.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
6.
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.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
7.
Real life seems to have no plots.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
8.
I never know why self-sacrifice is noble. Why is it better to sacrifice oneself than someone else?
Ivy Compton-Burnett
9.
Many people misjudge the permanent effect of sorrow, and their capacity to live in the past.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
10.
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.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
11.
I wonder the human race has been so fond of migrations, when the young take so hardly to traveling.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
12.
Appearances are not held to be a clue to the truth,' said his cousin. 'But we seem to have no other.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
13.
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
14.
Pushing forty? She's hanging on for dear life.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
15.
A person who can really be called an unselfish person, has no place in life.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
16.
At a certain point my novels set. They set just as hard as that jam jar. And then I know they are finished.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
17.
There is danger in courage. Cowardice is a power for good. We hardly know what it prevents.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
18.
The most original novelist now writing in English.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
19.
There is more difference within the sexes than between them.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
20.
People who have power respond simply. They have no minds but their own.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
21.
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!
Ivy Compton-Burnett
22.
I am ill at ease with people whose lives are an open book.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
23.
Dear, dear, the miniature world of the family! All the emotions of mankind seem to find a place in it.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
24.
There is probably nothing like living together for blinding people to each other.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
25.
There isn't much to say. I haven't been at all deedy.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
26.
People's weaker side is not necessarily their truer self.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
27.
We do not discuss the members of our family to their faces.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
28.
Never is a long word.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
29.
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.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
30.
We are always children to our mothers.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
31.
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
32.
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
33.
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.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
34.
People have never lost what they think they have.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
35.
Well, of course, people are only human... But it really does not seem much for them to be.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
36.
Civilized life exacts its toll.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
37.
To young people the future is still long.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
38.
It is no good to think that other people are out to serve our interests.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
39.
Our desires have a way of getting bigger with our incomes.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
40.
It is better to be drunk with loss and to beat the ground, than to let the deeper things gradually escape.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
41.
Ah, we have to be generous to be grateful ... One has oneself to be a giver.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
42.
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.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
43.
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?
Ivy Compton-Burnett
44.
Truth is so impossible. Something has to be done for it.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
45.
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
46.
If I were not a child with my parents, they would be more unloving toward me.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
47.
What concerns anyone so much as the time he has to live?
Ivy Compton-Burnett
48.
charm should be on the surface. It has no hidden use.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
49.
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
50.
Parents have too little respect for their children, just as the children have too much for the parents.
Ivy Compton-Burnett