Top 100 Elizabeth Bowen Quotes
#1. In big houses in which things are done properly, there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.
Elizabeth Bowen
#2. Without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold.
Elizabeth Bowen
#3. Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.
Elizabeth Bowen
#5. Dialogue is the ideal means of showing what is between the characters. It crystallizes relationships. It should, ideally, be so effective as to make analysis or explanation of the relationships between the characters unnecessary.
Elizabeth Bowen
#6. Love of privacy - perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society - has become in many people almost pathological.
Elizabeth Bowen
#7. Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.
Elizabeth Bowen
#8. Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
Elizabeth Bowen
#9. Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.
Elizabeth Bowen
#10. Whenever possible I avoid talking. Reprieve from talking is my idea of a holiday. At risk of seeming unsociable, which I am, I admit I love to be left in a beatific trance, when I am in one. Friendly Romans recognize that wish.
Elizabeth Bowen
#11. The most steady, the most self-sufficient nature depends, more than it knows, on its few chosen stimuli.
Elizabeth Bowen
#12. Fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.
Elizabeth Bowen
#13. Are you really an orphan?
Yes, I am, said Portia a shade shortly. Are you?
No, not at present, but I suppose it's a thing one is bound to be.
Elizabeth Bowen
#14. The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do, their victims lie strewn around.
Elizabeth Bowen
#15. Style is the thing that's always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style.
Elizabeth Bowen
#16. All my life I have said, "Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs"
and what a mistake.
Elizabeth Bowen
#19. Silence sat in the taxi, as though a stranger had got in.
Elizabeth Bowen
#21. The novelist's
any writer's
object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen.
Elizabeth Bowen
#22. She posed as being more indolent than she felt, for fear of finding herself less able than she could wish.
Elizabeth Bowen
#24. But Miss Pym gave an impression, somehow, of having been attacked from within.
Elizabeth Bowen
#25. But complex people are never certain that they are not crooks, never certain their passports are quite in order, and are, therefore, unnerved by the slightest thing.
Elizabeth Bowen
#26. Wariness had driven away poetry; from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could.
Elizabeth Bowen
#27. Darling, I don't want you; I've got no place for you; I only want what you give. I don't want the whole of anyone ... What you want is the whole of me-isn't it, isn't it?-and the whole of me isn't there for anybody. In that full sense you want me I don't exist.
Elizabeth Bowen
#28. Every short story is an experiment - what one must ask is not only, did it come off, but was it, as an experiment, worth making?
Elizabeth Bowen
#29. The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child.
Elizabeth Bowen
#30. Who is ever adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't.
Elizabeth Bowen
#32. To foresee pleasures makes anybody a poet ... to seek pleasure makes a hero of anyone: you open yourself so entirely to fate.
Elizabeth Bowen
#33. Each piece of dialogue MUST be "something happening" ... The "amusing" for its OWN sake should above all be censored ... The functional use of dialogue for the plot must be the first thing in the writer's mind. Where functional usefulness cannot be established, dialogue must be left out.
Elizabeth Bowen
#34. Convention was our safeguard: could one have stronger?
Elizabeth Bowen
#36. Grown-up people seem to be busy by clockwork ... They run their unswerving course from object to object, directed by some mysterious inner needle that points all the time to what they must do next. You can only marvel at such misuse of time.
Elizabeth Bowen
#38. Some of my ideas get enlarged almost before I have them.
Elizabeth Bowen
#39. Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
Elizabeth Bowen
#41. At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial games could be played.
Elizabeth Bowen
#42. Bring all your intelligence to bear on your beginning.
Elizabeth Bowen
#43. Memory must be patchy; what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out - unique to oneself, one's own, one's claim to identity, it implicates one's identity in its fibbing.
Elizabeth Bowen
#44. But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it?
Elizabeth Bowen
#45. Into the novel goes such taste as I have for rational behaviour and social portraiture. The short story, as I see it to be, allows for what is crazy about humanity: obstinacies, inordinate heroisms, immortal longings.
Elizabeth Bowen
#46. She was a scrap of a widow, ever so plucky, just back from China, with damp little hands, a husky voice, and defective tear-ducts that gave her eyes always rather a swimmy look. She had a prostrated way of looking up at you, and that fluffy, bird's-nesty hair that hairpins get lost in.
Elizabeth Bowen
#47. Jane Austen, much in advance of her day, was a mistress of the use of the dialogue. She used it as dialogue should be used-to advance the story; not only to show the characters, but to advance.
Elizabeth Bowen
#48. In my experience one thing you don't learn from is anything anyone set up to be a lesson; what you are to know you pick up as you go along.
Elizabeth Bowen
#49. Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant; impossible socially, but full scale; and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.
Elizabeth Bowen
#50. It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
Elizabeth Bowen
#51. People in love, in whom every sense is open, cannot beat off the influence of a place.
Elizabeth Bowen
#52. Though not all reading children grow up to be writers, I take it that most creative writers must in their day have been reading children.
Elizabeth Bowen
#54. Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
Elizabeth Bowen
#55. Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.
Elizabeth Bowen
#56. Characters should on the whole, be under rather than over articulate. What they intend to say should be more evident, more striking (because of its greater inner importance to the plot) than what they arrive at saying.
Elizabeth Bowen
#57. Artists were intended to be an ornament to society. As a society in themselves they are unthinkable.
Elizabeth Bowen
#58. Spoilt pleasure is a sad, unseemly thing; you can only bury it.
Elizabeth Bowen
#59. The passion of vanity has its own depths in the spirit, and is powerfully militant.
Elizabeth Bowen
#60. Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft ...
Elizabeth Bowen
#61. Often when I write I am trying to make words do the work of line and color. I have the painter's sensitivity to light. Much of my writing is verbal painting.
Elizabeth Bowen
#62. What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.
Elizabeth Bowen
#64. Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?
Elizabeth Bowen
#65. Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?
Elizabeth Bowen
#66. Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.
Elizabeth Bowen
#68. Art is for [the Irish] inseparable from artifice: of that, the theatre is the home. Possibly, it was England made me a novelist.
Elizabeth Bowen
#69. I don't know what's come over this place,' Maud stated. 'However, the Lord did, so in despair He showed me what I had better do.'
'And did the Lord suggest your sticking up your father for ten shillings?'
'No, I thought of that,' said Maud, not turning a hair.
Elizabeth Bowen
#70. The power-loving temperament is more dangerous when it either prefers or is forced to operate in what is materially a void. Wehave everything to dread from the dispossessed.
Elizabeth Bowen
#71. I can't see or feel the conflict between love and religion. To me, they're the same thing.
Elizabeth Bowen
#72. The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.
Elizabeth Bowen
#73. Rich women live at such a distance from life that very often they never see their money - the Queen, they say, for instance, never carries a purse.
Elizabeth Bowen
#74. Livvy noted there seemed some communal feeling between the married: any wife could be faintly rude to anyone else's husband.
Elizabeth Bowen
#75. Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable.
Elizabeth Bowen
#76. No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life
the first twenty years of it
had about them something semi-fictitious.
Elizabeth Bowen
#78. Also, perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all.
Elizabeth Bowen
#80. There is no doubt that sorrow brings one down in the world. The aristocratic privilege of silence belongs, you soon find out, to only the happy state- or, at least, to the state when pain keeps within bounds.
Elizabeth Bowen
#81. [My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.
Elizabeth Bowen
#82. Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.
Elizabeth Bowen
#83. If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
Elizabeth Bowen
#84. Princess Bibesco delighted in a semi-ideal world - a world which, though having a counterpart in her experience, was to a great extent brought into being by her own temperament and, one might say, flair.
Elizabeth Bowen
#85. Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.
Elizabeth Bowen
#86. Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.
Elizabeth Bowen
#87. But in general, for the purposes of most novelists, the number of objects genuinely necessary for ... describing a scene will be found to be very small.
Elizabeth Bowen
#88. One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
Elizabeth Bowen
#90. As for Thomas, the longer he lived, the less he cared for the world.
Elizabeth Bowen
#92. Every love has a poetic relevance of its own; each love brings to light only what to it is relevant. Outside lies the junk-yard of what does not matter.
Elizabeth Bowen
#93. Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
Elizabeth Bowen
#96. The stupid person's idea of the clever person. [on Aldous Huxley, in Spectator magazine, 1936]
Elizabeth Bowen
#97. The paradox of romantic love
that what one possesses, one can no longer desire
was at work.
Elizabeth Bowen
#98. Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little, even if one did once know what one meant.
Elizabeth Bowen
#99. That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
Elizabeth Bowen
#100. The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.
Elizabeth Bowen
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