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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #22894
#2. Without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #33328
#3. Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #49740
#4. Education is not so important as people think.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #71534
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #77912
#6. Love of privacy - perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society - has become in many people almost pathological.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #85850
#7. Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #86966
#8. Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #104999
#9. Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #118659
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #132133
#11. The most steady, the most self-sufficient nature depends, more than it knows, on its few chosen stimuli.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #141883
#12. Fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #166883
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #219575
#14. The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do, their victims lie strewn around.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #226178
#15. Style is the thing that's always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #240664
#16. All my life I have said, "Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs"
and what a mistake.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #251019
#17. Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #264311
#18. Dogs are a habit, I think.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #301311
#19. Silence sat in the taxi, as though a stranger had got in.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #306439
#20. Love is obtuse and reckless; it interferes.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #323208
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #347375
#22. She posed as being more indolent than she felt, for fear of finding herself less able than she could wish.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #358278
#23. Certain books come to meet me, as do people.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #363732
#24. But Miss Pym gave an impression, somehow, of having been attacked from within.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #369881
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #385547
#26. Wariness had driven away poetry; from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #392414
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #428240
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #430820
#29. The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #455446
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #480659
#31. Nobody ever dies of an indignity.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #482012
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #486054
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #488781
#34. Convention was our safeguard: could one have stronger?

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #497281
#35. I suspect victims; they win in the long run.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #513412
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #516579
#37. A living dog's better than a dead lion.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #544514
#38. Some of my ideas get enlarged almost before I have them.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #576253
#39. Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #580710
#40. Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #595355
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #625798
#42. Bring all your intelligence to bear on your beginning.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #647734
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #733818
#44. But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it?

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #780359
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #795539
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #817767
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #822789
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #874493
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #875768
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #885250
#51. People in love, in whom every sense is open, cannot beat off the influence of a place.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #906181
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #916935
#53. Life is a succession of readjustments.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #938801
#54. Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #939384
#55. Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #959031
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #973236
#57. Artists were intended to be an ornament to society. As a society in themselves they are unthinkable.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #984032
#58. Spoilt pleasure is a sad, unseemly thing; you can only bury it.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1022870
#59. The passion of vanity has its own depths in the spirit, and is powerfully militant.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1052860
#60. Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft ...

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1057577
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1061458
#62. What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1147084
#63. Makes of men date, like makes of car.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1152576
#64. Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1159522
#65. Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1162807
#66. Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1176963
#67. Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1195492
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1244731
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1267624
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1280301
#71. I can't see or feel the conflict between love and religion. To me, they're the same thing.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1283043
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1303869
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1312951
#74. Livvy noted there seemed some communal feeling between the married: any wife could be faintly rude to anyone else's husband.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1317216
#75. Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1376406
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1389837
#77. Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1438211
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1479930
#79. Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1499214
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1605738
#81. [My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1621736
#82. Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1631277
#83. If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1634654
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1649012
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1649122
#86. Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1652307
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1656494
#88. One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1673552
#89. Revenge was a very wild kind of justice ...

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1673555
#90. As for Thomas, the longer he lived, the less he cared for the world.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1676937
#91. No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1682785
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1702593
#93. Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1702941
#94. Memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1747136
#95. Plot is the knowing of destination.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1785767
#96. The stupid person's idea of the clever person. [on Aldous Huxley, in Spectator magazine, 1936]

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1824669
#97. The paradox of romantic love
that what one possesses, one can no longer desire
was at work.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1834035
#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

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1834865
#99. That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1855842
#100. The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes #1869827

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