Ivy Compton-Burnett Quotes
I never know why self-sacrifice is noble. Why is it better to sacrifice oneself than someone else?

Quotes to Explore
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The thought of going on tour with people like Toyah Wilcox is just appalling. I'm certainly not tempted.
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Every entrepreneur knows how agonizingly difficult it is to make the decision to give it your all, knowing that failure is inevitable; the successful ones know that the only way to get back up is through learning from that failure.
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One of the pillars of 'Cyrano' is recreating a love story and, like any archetype, these great stories tend to be captivating, among other things, because they are made of those universal things that move us.
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Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done.
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Most of the time, we keep looking outside and feeling sad about what others have. Those are mere excuses.
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Trust your father. He is not perfect, but he loves you and would never do anything he didn't think was in your best interest. So talk to him. Share your thoughts and feelings, your dreams and your fears. The more he knows about your life, the better chance he has to understand your concerns and to give you good counsel.
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A single kind of red cell is supposed to have an enormous number of different substances on it, and in the same way there are substances in the serum to react with many different animal cells. In addition, the substances which match each kind of cell are different in each kind of serum. The number of hypothetical different substances postulated makes this conception so uneconomical that the question must be asked whether it is the only one possible. ... We ourselves hold that another, simpler, explanation is possible.
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It is neither a great praise nor a great blame when people say a tendency is in or out of fashion. If a tendency is as it should be at one time, it is always as it should be.
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Generation after generation can't just be loaded with more and more nuclear weapons and not ultimately dance to that music.
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An army of lovers shall not fail.
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I do believe you would be perfectly happy shut up in your study with your rolls of manuscript all your life, without seeing another human being save a servant to bring you in bread and fruit and water twice a day.
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You cannot stop trusting people in life but I have learned to be a little bit careful. The way to make people trust-worthy is to trust them.
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We thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well being and delight.
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If every one said orders were impossible to carry out when they were received where would you be? Where would we all be if you just said, "Impossible," when orders came?
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I used to play cello. My mother kept me out of school a whole year to study music and counterpoint. She thought I had ability, but I was absolutely without talent.
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We were pleased the tent was put up correctly and the suits went on properly and quickly, ... And we worked well with the Med-Act people. Our one frustration, inside the tent, was that when we were ready (to decontaminate) another person we didn't (always) have a bed outside to transport the previous patient away.
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You must obey the law, always, not only when they grab you by your special place.
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I don't ever wish I was somebody else.
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To leave a book is like leaving the better part of oneself.
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Nothing is work unless you'd rather be doing something else.
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Let me be the first to say I can't remember ever having a conversation about the definition of consent when I was a kid. I knew that 'no' meant 'no,' but that's it.
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I never know why self-sacrifice is noble. Why is it better to sacrifice oneself than someone else?