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

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
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More quotes by 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
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There is probably nothing like living together for blinding people to each other.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
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The most original novelist now writing in English.
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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Many people misjudge the permanent effect of sorrow, and their capacity to live in the past.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
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My youth is escaping without giving me anything it owes me.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
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There are different kinds of wrong. The people sinned against are not always the best.
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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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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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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As regards plots I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots.
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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It is no good to think that other people are out to serve our interests.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
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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
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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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We must use words as they are used, or stand aside from life.
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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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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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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People who have power respond simply. They have no minds but their own.
Ivy Compton-Burnett