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The most original novelist now writing in English.

Ivy Compton-Burnett

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Ivy Compton-Burnett
Age: 85 †
Born: 1884
Born: June 5
Died: 1969
Died: August 27
Novelist
Writer
London
England
I. Compton-Burnett
Writing
Novelist
Novelists
Originals
Original
English

More quotes by Ivy Compton-Burnett

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There is more difference within the sexes than between them.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
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A person who can really be called an unselfish person, has no place in life.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
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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
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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
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We none of us talk to people as we do behind their backs.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
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We can build upon foundations anywhere if they are well and firmly laid.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
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There is probably nothing like living together for blinding people to each other.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
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We must use words as they are used, or stand aside from life.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
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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
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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
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It will be a beautiful family talk, mean and worried and full of sorrow and spite and excitement.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
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Our desires have a way of getting bigger with our incomes.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
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If I were not a child with my parents, they would be more unloving toward me.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
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Parents have too little respect for their children, just as the children have too much for the parents.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
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charm should be on the surface. It has no hidden use.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
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We do not discuss the members of our family to their faces.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
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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
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Magnifying a matter is not the way to mend it.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
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What concerns anyone so much as the time he has to live?
Ivy Compton-Burnett
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It is better to be drunk with loss and to beat the ground, than to let the deeper things gradually escape.
Ivy Compton-Burnett