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

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
Hidden
Surface
Use
Charm

More quotes by Ivy Compton-Burnett

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People have never lost what they think they have.
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 leopard does not change his spots, or change his feeling that spots are rather a credit.
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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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
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There isn't much to say. I haven't been at all deedy.
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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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
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It is no good to think that other people are out to serve our interests.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
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People who have power respond simply. They have no minds but their own.
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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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
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Many people misjudge the permanent effect of sorrow, and their capacity to live in the past.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
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[On writing:] What a difficult kind of work to choose! But of course one did not choose it. There was no choice.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
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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
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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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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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We can build upon foundations anywhere if they are well and firmly laid.
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