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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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Ivy Compton-Burnett
Age: 85 †
Born: 1884
Born: June 5
Died: 1969
Died: August 27
Novelist
Writer
London
England
I. Compton-Burnett
Minds
Hear
Mind
Things
Would
People
Privacy
Meant
More quotes by Ivy Compton-Burnett
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
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
There isn't much to say. I haven't been at all deedy.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
some people always have a touch of youth about them.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
My youth is escaping without giving me anything it owes me.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
What concerns anyone so much as the time he has to live?
Ivy Compton-Burnett
As regards plots I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
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
There is more difference within the sexes than between them.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
Many people misjudge the permanent effect of sorrow, and their capacity to live in the past.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
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
Magnifying a matter is not the way to mend it.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
We none of us talk to people as we do behind their backs.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
We can build upon foundations anywhere if they are well and firmly laid.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
[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
There is probably nothing like living together for blinding people to each other.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
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
People have never lost what they think they have.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
A leopard does not change his spots, or change his feeling that spots are rather a credit.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
It is no good to think that other people are out to serve our interests.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
