Top 50 Ivy Compton-Burnett Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We can build upon foundations anywhere if they are well and firmly laid.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

2. “I never know why self-sacrifice is noble. Why is it better to sacrifice oneself than someone else?”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

3. “There is more difference within the sexes than between them.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

4. “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

5. “There isn’t much to say. I haven’t been at all deedy.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

6. “Magnifying a matter is not the way to mend it.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

7. “To young people the future is still long.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

8. “There is probably nothing like living together for blinding people to each other.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

9. “A leopard does not change his spots, or change his feeling that spots are rather a credit.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

10. “Many people misjudge the permanent effect of sorrow, and their capacity to live in the past.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

11. “I am ill at ease with people whose lives are an open book.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

12. “Pushing forty? She’s hanging on for dear life.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

13. “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

14. “It is better to be drunk with loss and to beat the ground, than to let the deeper things gradually escape.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

15. “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

16. “Never is a long word.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

17. “Parents have too little respect for their children, just as the children have too much for the parents.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

18. “My youth is escaping without giving me anything it owes me.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

19. “If I were not a child with my parents, they would be more unloving toward me...”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

20. “People’s weaker side is not necessarily their truer self.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

21. “Civilized life exacts its toll.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

22. “It is so subtle to write things that have no meaning.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

23. “People who have power respond simply. They have no minds but their own.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

24. “Dear, dear, the miniature world of the family! All the emotions of mankind seem to find a place in it.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

25. “Speaking of things robs them of half their terrors.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

26. “It will be a beautiful family talk, mean and worried and full of sorrow and spite and excitement.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

27. “A person who can really be called an unselfish person, has no place in life.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

28. “The most original novelist now writing in English.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

29. “We are always children to our mothers.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

30. “Real charity and real ability never to condemn-the one real virtue-is so often the result of a waking experience that gives a glimpse of what lies beneath things.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

31. “Real life seems to have no plots.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

32. “We none of us talk to people as we do behind their backs.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

33. “What concerns anyone so much as the time he has to live?”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

34. “As regards plots 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 real life. But I think there are signs that strange things happen, though they do not emerge.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

35. “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

36. “There is danger in courage. Cowardice is a power for good. We hardly know what it prevents.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

37. “We must use words as they are used, or stand aside from life.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

38. “Anyone who picks up a Compton-Burnett finds it very hard not to put it down.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

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

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

40. “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.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

41. “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

42. “People have never lost what they think they have.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

43. “People don’t resent having nothing nearly as much as too little.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

44. “I wonder the human race has been so fond of migrations, when the young take so hardly to traveling...”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

45. “Well, the English have no family feelings. That is, none of the kind you mean. They have them, and one of them is that relations must cause no expense.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

46. “The wrong is never the only thing a wrong-doer has done.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

47. “It is no good to think that other people are out to serve our interests.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

48. “There are different kinds of wrong. The people sinned against are not always the best.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett

49. “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

50. “People do not like to lose their lives. That is the reason why they should not take other people’s.”

— Ivy Compton-Burnett