Ivy Compton-Burnett Quotes - Page 2

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

Civilized life exacts its toll.

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

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

We are always children to our mothers.

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

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

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.

[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.

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

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

To young people the future is still long.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The most original novelist now writing in English.

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.

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

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