Ivy Compton-Burnett Quotes
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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.
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It is no good to think that other people are out to serve our interests.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Truth is so impossible. Something has to be done for it.
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I wonder the human race has been so fond of migrations, when the young take so hardly to traveling.
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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.
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The most original novelist now writing in English.
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To young people the future is still long.
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I never know why self-sacrifice is noble. Why is it better to sacrifice oneself than someone else?
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Duty is seldom liked either by the doer or the object ... And why should it be? It is not often of advantage to either.
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If I were not a child with my parents, they would be more unloving toward me.
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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.
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Magnifying a matter is not the way to mend it.
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There is more difference within the sexes than between them.
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Ah, we have to be generous to be grateful ... One has oneself to be a giver.
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some people always have a touch of youth about them.
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Our desires have a way of getting bigger with our incomes.
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People's weaker side is not necessarily their truer self.
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We are always children to our mothers.
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I am ill at ease with people whose lives are an open book.
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Parents have too little respect for their children, just as the children have too much for the parents.
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As regards plots I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots.
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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.
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We do not discuss the members of our family to their faces.
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Pushing forty? She's hanging on for dear life.
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Most of the pleasure of making a book would go if it held nothing to be shared by other people. I would write for a few dozen people, and sometimes it seems that I do so, but I would not write for no-one.
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It will be a beautiful family talk, mean and worried and full of sorrow and spite and excitement.
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We must use words as they are used, or stand aside from life.
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