Ivy Compton-Burnett

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

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

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

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

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

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

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

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

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

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

To young people the future is still long.

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

Magnifying a matter is not the way to mend it.

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

“Everything is breaking stones, up to a point.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

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

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

We are always children to our mothers.

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

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

— 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

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

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

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

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

Real charity and real ability never to condemn-the one real virtue-is so often the result of a waking experience that gives a…

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

I never agree with the compliments paid to it. It is not a great healer. It is an indifferent and perfunctory one.…

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

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

— 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

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

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

When I die, people will say it is the best thing for me. It is because they know it is the worst.…

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

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

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

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

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

The most original novelist now writing in English.

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

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

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

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

— Ivy Compton-Burnett