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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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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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We must use words as they are used, or stand aside from life.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
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Truth is so impossible. Something has to be done for it.
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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To young people the future is still long.
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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Many people misjudge the permanent effect of sorrow, and their capacity to live in the past.
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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There is more difference within the sexes than between them.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
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The most original novelist now writing in English.
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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There is probably nothing like living together for blinding people to each other.
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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We can build upon foundations anywhere if they are well and firmly laid.
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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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 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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[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 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 is in our minds that we live much of our life.
Ivy Compton-Burnett