Top 100 Quotes About Elizabeth Bowen
#1. Plot might seem to be a matter of choice. It is not. The particular plot is something the novelist is driven to: it is what is left after the whittling-away of alternatives.' Elizabeth Bowen opened her Notes on Writing a Novel (1945, reprinted in Collected Impressions, Longmans, Green & Co.,
Elizabeth Bowen
#2. I was influenced by big, strong voices - writers like Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Jane Bowles; gay writers like Ed White, Michael Cunningham, Allen Hollinghurst; and contemporary lesbian writers, like Dorothy Allison.
Stacey D'Erasmo
#3. At Spezia when I am angry I go full of smoke inside, but when you make me angry I see everything.
Elizabeth Bowen
#4. 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
#5. Good-byes breed a sort of distaste for whomever you say good-bye to; this hurts, you feel, this must not happen again.
Elizabeth Bowen
#6. Without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold.
Elizabeth Bowen
#7. I do like Italian graves; they look so much more lived in.
Elizabeth Bowen
#8. Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.
Elizabeth Bowen
#9. Short of a small range of physical acts-a fight, murder, lovemaking-dialogue is the most vigorous and visible inter-action of which characters in a novel are capable. Speech is what characters do to each other.
Elizabeth Bowen
#11. 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
#12. Forgiveness should be an act, but this is a state with him.
Elizabeth Bowen
#13. Rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate - it slid and melted away.
Elizabeth Bowen
#14. Love of privacy - perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society - has become in many people almost pathological.
Elizabeth Bowen
#15. Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.
Elizabeth Bowen
#16. I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.
Elizabeth Bowen
#17. Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
Elizabeth Bowen
#18. [A writer] should try not to be too far, personally, below the level of his work.
Elizabeth Bowen
#19. Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.
Elizabeth Bowen
#20. 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
#21. After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.
Elizabeth Bowen
#22. The most steady, the most self-sufficient nature depends, more than it knows, on its few chosen stimuli.
Elizabeth Bowen
#23. Young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate; they like to have loud chords struck on them.
Elizabeth Bowen
#24. If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.
Elizabeth Bowen
#25. But there's no end to what's been said, and I'll be a party to nothing. I was born with my mouth shut:those with their mouths open do nothing but start trouble and catch flies.
Elizabeth Bowen
#26. History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts; it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called 'eternal.' What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.
Elizabeth Bowen
#27. Fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.
Elizabeth Bowen
#28. She thought she need not worry about her youth; it wasted itself spontaneously, like sunshine elsewhere or firelight in an empty room.
Elizabeth Bowen
#29. In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.
Elizabeth Bowen
#30. 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
#31. The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do, their victims lie strewn around.
Elizabeth Bowen
#32. Henrietta knew of the heart as an organ; she privately saw it covered in red plush and believed that it could not break, though it might tear.
Elizabeth Bowen
#33. Style is the thing that's always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style.
Elizabeth Bowen
#34. All my life I have said, "Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs"
and what a mistake.
Elizabeth Bowen
#36. Childish fantasy, like the sheath over the bud, not only protects but curbs the terrible budding spirit, protects not only innocence from the world, but the world from the power of innocence.
Elizabeth Bowen
#37. When I read a story, I relive the moment from which it sprang. A scene burned itself into me, a building magnetized me, a mood orseason of Nature's penetrated me, history suddenly appeared to me in some tiny act, or a face had begun to haunt me before I glanced at it.
Elizabeth Bowen
#38. We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.
Elizabeth Bowen
#41. Silence sat in the taxi, as though a stranger had got in.
Elizabeth Bowen
#42. Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.
Elizabeth Bowen
#43. One should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.
Elizabeth Bowen
#45. The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved is part of one's self-respect.
Elizabeth Bowen
#46. Expectations are the most perilous form of dream, and when dreams do realise themselves it is in the waking world: the difference is subtly but often painfully felt.
Elizabeth Bowen
#47. 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
#48. She posed as being more indolent than she felt, for fear of finding herself less able than she could wish.
Elizabeth Bowen
#50. But Miss Pym gave an impression, somehow, of having been attacked from within.
Elizabeth Bowen
#51. A Bowen, in the first place, made Bowen's Court. Since then, with a rather alarming sureness, Bowen's Court has made all the succeeding Bowens.
Elizabeth Bowen
#52. 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
#53. Wariness had driven away poetry; from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could.
Elizabeth Bowen
#54. The process of reading is reciprocal; the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.
Elizabeth Bowen
#55. When one is a child, the disposition of objects, tables and chairs and doors, seems part of the natural order: a house-move lets in chaos - as it does for a dog.
Elizabeth Bowen
#56. It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home. The need to attach themselves makes wandering people strike roots in a day: wherever we unconsciously feel, we live.
Elizabeth Bowen
#57. Some people are moulded by their aspirations, others by their hostilities.
Elizabeth Bowen
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. We can surmount the anger we feel. To find oneself like a young tree inside a tomb is to discover the power to crack the tomb and grow up to any height.
Elizabeth Bowen
#61. First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences, gestures, attitudes, a burning phrase with no context.
Elizabeth Bowen
#62. The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child.
Elizabeth Bowen
#63. I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.
Elizabeth Bowen
#64. The craft of the novelist does lie first of all in story-telling.
Elizabeth Bowen
#65. It appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy, little is quite impossible.
Elizabeth Bowen
#67. 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
#69. To foresee pleasures makes anybody a poet ... to seek pleasure makes a hero of anyone: you open yourself so entirely to fate.
Elizabeth Bowen
#70. 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
#71. Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.
Elizabeth Bowen
#72. Convention was our safeguard: could one have stronger?
Elizabeth Bowen
#73. This, my first [bicycle] had an intrinsic beauty. And it opened for me an era of all but flying, which roads emptily crossing theairy, gold-gorsy Common enhanced. Nothing since has equalled that birdlike freedom.
Elizabeth Bowen
#75. 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
#76. All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.
Elizabeth Bowen
#77. Imagination of my kind is most caught, most fired, most worked upon by the unfamiliar: I have thrivenon the changes and chances, the dislocations andcontrasts which have made up so much of my life.
Elizabeth Bowen
#78. Don't you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same ...
Elizabeth Bowen
#80. Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.
Elizabeth Bowen
#81. Some of my ideas get enlarged almost before I have them.
Elizabeth Bowen
#82. Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
Elizabeth Bowen
#83. Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.
Elizabeth Bowen
#84. Sacrificers are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those they sacrifice.
Elizabeth Bowen
#86. Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
Elizabeth Bowen
#87. 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
#88. To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.
Elizabeth Bowen
#89. Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
Elizabeth Bowen
#90. Bring all your intelligence to bear on your beginning.
Elizabeth Bowen
#91. Story involves action. Action towards an end not to be foreseen (by the reader) but also towards an end which, having been reached, must be seen to have been from the start inevitable.
Elizabeth Bowen
#93. One can suffer a convulsion of one's entire nature, and, unless it makes some noise, no one notices. It's not just that we are incurious; we completely lack any sense of each other's existences.
Elizabeth Bowen
#96. A romantic man often feels more uplifted with two women than with one: his love seems to hit the ideal mark somewhere between two different faces.
Elizabeth Bowen
#98. The furniture would have missed you?
Furniture's knowing all right. Not much gets past the things in a room, I daresay, and chairs and tables don't go to the grave so soon. Every time I take the soft cloth to that stuff in the drawingroom, I could say, 'Well, you know a bit more'.
Elizabeth Bowen
#99. I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experiences, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true.
Elizabeth Bowen
#100. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.
Elizabeth Bowen
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