Catherine Drinker Bowen Quotes

#1. For you born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word"
- Catherine Drinker Bowen

Yvonne Finn

#2. Will the reader turn the page?

Catherine Drinker Bowen

#3. A woman's biography - with about eight famous historical exceptions - so often turns out to be the story of a man and the woman who helped his career.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

#4. All the others arts are lonely. We paint alone
my picture, my interpretation of the sky. My poem, my novel. But in music
ensemble music, not soloism
we share. No altruism this, for we receive tenfold what we give.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

#5. How instant it was, desire. It was like a bomb exploding, fragmenting and igniting all her nerve endings.

Paullina Simons

#6. In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

#7. Your concert-goer, though he feed upon symphony as a lamb upon milk, is no true lover if he play no instrument. Your true lover does more than admire the muse; he sweats a little in her service.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

#8. For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

#9. History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

#10. As a whole, investors should welcome attempts to safeguard the integrity of markets. You need very clear rules applied to markets.

Mohamed El-Erian

#11. People who carry a musical soul about them are, I think, more receptive than others. They smile more readily. One feels in them a pleasant propensity toward the lesser sins, a pleasing readiness also to admit the possibility that on occasion they may be in the wrong
they may be mistaken.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

#12. Life is a mission, not a career.

Stephen Covey

#13. What the writer needs is an empty day ahead.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

#14. I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little more, as I grown older.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

#15. If art has a purpose, it is to interpret life, reproduce it in fresh visions.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

#16. I don't want to lean back into the past, or forward into the future. I don't want to wish the present moment away. The truth is in the present moment. The great paradox is that when I'm really able to do that, time slows down and opens up. Time feels suddenly and inexplicably without end.

Dani Shapiro

#17. Writers seldom choose as friends those self-centered characters who are never in trouble, never make mistakes, and always count their change as it is handed to them.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

#18. When Byron's eyes were shut in death, We bow'd our head and held our breath. He taught us little; but our soul Had felt his like a thunder roll ... We watch'd the fount of fiery life Which serv'd for that Titanic life.

Matthew Arnold

#19. Many a man who has known himself at ten forgets himself utterly between ten and thirty.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

#20. Writing is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

#21. Artists often think they are going to die before their time. They seem to possess a heightened sense of the passing of the hours.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

#22. All this is true and false; and it is true and false to say that it is true and false.

Aleister Crowley

#23. It is a great, a pleasant thing to have a friend with whom to walk, untroubled, through the woods, by the stream, saying nothing, at peace
the heart all clean and quiet and empty, ready for the spirit that may choose to be its guest.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

#24. What pioneer ever had chart and a lighthouse to steer by?

Catherine Drinker Bowen

#25. Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

#26. Every once in a while I feel despair over the fate of the planet. If you've been following climate science, you know what I mean: the sense that we're hurtling toward catastrophe but nobody wants to hear about it or do anything to avert it.

Paul Krugman

#27. Colonial America had looked upon (lawyers) as mere tradesmen who earned a questionable living by cleverness and chicanery.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

#28. The planet's biggest problems have to do with sustainability, environmental decline, global poverty, disease, conflict and so forth. Really, they're all interconnected - it's one big problem, which is that the way we're doing things can't go on.

Alex Steffen

#29. I have noted that, barring accidents, artists whose powers wear best and last longest are those who have trained themselves to work under adversity. Great artists treasure their time with a bitter and snarling miserliness.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

#30. Biographers, by their very nature, want to know everything about everybody, dead or alive.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

#31. There is a marvelous turn and trick to British arrogance; its apparent unconsciousness makes it twice as effectual.

Catherine Drinker Bowen