Ivy Compton-Burnett Quotes

the very fact of the death of someone close to them aroused in all who heard about it, as always, a feeling of delight that he had died and they hadn't.

Death is a greatly overrated experience. I hated Mother's and I'm not looking forward to my own. Apart from the sorrow there are the bills to be paid. Nobody dies for free.

I’m always feeling death, and that is a part of life. When you know a lot of people, you will always experience death.

Not the least of the hardships to which the dying are subject is the visitation of their loved ones. The poor darlings, God bless them, may feel every impulse to condole and console, but their primary sensation is nonetheless one of embarrassment in the presence of the unspeakable and a guilty gratitude that it is not yet their fate.

I've always been fascinated by dark subjects, especially people's reactions to them. Why are people so uncomfortable talking about death if everyone dies?

We want our idols to be dead because it makes death a much less scary place.

The stroke has given me another way to serve people. It lets me feel more deeply the pain of others; to help them know by example that ultimately, whatever happens, no harm can come. 'Death is perfectly safe,' I like to say.

Going through an illness and then death of a close friend has changed my attitudes to friendship enormously.

It's unnatural to believe death usually has a beauty and a concordance and is usually a coming together of your life's work. It leads to frustration for the patient. And it leaves grieving families convinced they did something wrong.

And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.

When anyone dies, it's sad.

I think death is a big deal, obviously.

I think if I were dying and I heard of an act of injustice, it would start me up to a moment's life again.

Moms Mabley said you have to say good things about the dead. I say, 'He's dead. Good.'

Do not pity the dead, Harry.

Look, are you just fiddling around with me or what?" "I just want you to feel you're doing well. I hate for people o die embarrassed.

So many people choose silence after the immediate wake of a death out of fear of saying something out of turn or "bringing up bad memories" that bereaved people often feel forgotten.

Why are people more appalled at what they term an unnatural form of dying than by an unnatural form of living?

I feel bad for people who die on Valentine's Day. How much would flowers cost then, ten grand?

Graves are for the living, not the dead. It gives us something to concentrate on instead of the fact that our loved one is rotting under the ground.

But in the end, we learn we can forgive most people. The cushion of mortality makes their wrongdoing seem less dark, and whatever roads they traveled seem less foolhardy.

It used to be I thought of death as a man something like Grandfather a friend of his a kind of private and particular friend like we used to think of Grandfather's desk not to touch it not even to talk loud in the room where it was.

people are not good to each other. perhaps if they were our deaths would not be so sad.

There are about as many ways to be dead as there are to be alive. People linger in different ways, both publicly and privately.