Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Never is a long word.
Civilized life exacts its toll.
Real life seems to have no plots.
We are always children to our mothers.
To young people the future is still long.
Magnifying a matter is not the way to mend it.
Pushing forty? She's hanging on for dear life.
it is in our minds that we live much of our life.
People have never lost what they think they have.
The most original novelist now writing in English.
some people always have a touch of youth about them.
There isn't much to say. I haven't been at all deedy.
charm should be on the surface. It has no hidden use.
Truth is so impossible. Something has to be done for it.
What concerns anyone so much as the time he has to live?
People's weaker side is not necessarily their truer self.
We none of us talk to people as we do behind their backs.
Our desires have a way of getting bigger with our incomes.
I am ill at ease with people whose lives are an open book.
My youth is escaping without giving me anything it owes me.
We do not discuss the members of our family to their faces.
There is more difference within the sexes than between them.
We must use words as they are used, or stand aside from life.
People who have power respond simply. They have no minds but their own.
We can build upon foundations anywhere if they are well and firmly laid.
It is no good to think that other people are out to serve our interests.
A person who can really be called an unselfish person, has no place in life.
Ah, we have to be generous to be grateful ... One has oneself to be a giver.
Anyone who picks up a Compton-Burnett finds it very hard not to put it down.
If I were not a child with my parents, they would be more unloving toward me.
There is probably nothing like living together for blinding people to each other.
As regards plots I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots.
There are different kinds of wrong. The people sinned against are not always the best.
A leopard does not change his spots, or change his feeling that spots are rather a credit.
Well, of course, people are only human... But it really does not seem much for them to be.
There is danger in courage. Cowardice is a power for good. We hardly know what it prevents.
Many people misjudge the permanent effect of sorrow, and their capacity to live in the past.
It will be a beautiful family talk, mean and worried and full of sorrow and spite and excitement.
I never know why self-sacrifice is noble. Why is it better to sacrifice oneself than someone else?
I wonder the human race has been so fond of migrations, when the young take so hardly to traveling.
Appearances are not held to be a clue to the truth,' said his cousin. 'But we seem to have no other.
Dear, dear, the miniature world of the family! All the emotions of mankind seem to find a place in it.
Parents have too little respect for their children, just as the children have too much for the parents.
It is better to be drunk with loss and to beat the ground, than to let the deeper things gradually escape.
At a certain point my novels set. They set just as hard as that jam jar. And then I know they are finished.
You should not want to know the things in people's minds. If you were meant to hear them, they would be said.
[On writing:] What a difficult kind of work to choose! But of course one did not choose it. There was no choice.
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.
Duty is seldom liked either by the doer or the object ... And why should it be? It is not often of advantage to either.
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.