Elizabeth Bowen quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Elizabeth Bowen on Wise Famous Quotes.

Dialogue should convey a sense of spontaneity but eliminate the repetitiveness of real talk.

In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.

Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.

You must show him your monkey: I am sure he will like that.

When you love someone, all your saved-up wishes start coming out.

A smell of sandalwood boxes, a kind of glaze on the air from all the chintzes numbed his earthy vitality, he became all ribs and uniform.

For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.

Rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate - it slid and melted away.

Plot is the knowing of destination.

Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.

Without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold.

But what a horrible world 'society' is.

Sacrificers are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those they sacrifice.

Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft ...

Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.

There must be perfect towns where shadows were strong like buildings, towns secret without coldness, unaware without indifference.

The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child.

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?

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.

[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.

If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.

I can't see or feel the conflict between love and religion. To me, they're the same thing.

Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.

Makes of men date, like makes of car.

There must be something she wanted; and that therefore she was no lady.

If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.

Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.

Almost everyone admits to hunger during the Opera ... Hunger is so exalting that during a last act you practically levitate.

Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.

All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.

Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

The most steady, the most self-sufficient nature depends, more than it knows, on its few chosen stimuli.

To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.

Some people are moulded by their aspirations, others by their hostilities.

Forgiveness should be an act, but this is a state with him.

Love is obtuse and reckless; it interferes.

Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.

But to be quite oneself one must first waste a little time.

To foresee pleasures makes anybody a poet ... to seek pleasure makes a hero of anyone: you open yourself so entirely to fate.

For God's sake, is there no plain man?

Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.

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.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

The happy passive nature, locked up with itself like a mirror in an airy room, reflects what goes on but demands not to be approached.

Makes of men date, like makes of cars...

Writers do not find subjects; subjects find them.

The stupid person's idea of the clever person. [on Aldous Huxley, in Spectator magazine, 1936]

A living dog's better than a dead lion.

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.

People in love, in whom every sense is open, cannot beat off the influence of a place.

Also, perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all.

Fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.

What's the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually - our sense of personality is a sense of outrage ...

Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.

Spoilt pleasure is a sad, unseemly thing; you can only bury it.

Have not all poetic truths been already stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be final.

She posed as being more indolent than she felt, for fear of finding herself less able than she could wish.

Good-byes breed a sort of distaste for whomever you say good-bye to; this hurts, you feel, this must not happen again.

The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.

Dialogue should show the relationships among people.

Disappointment tears the bearable film of life.

One should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.

The paradox of romantic love
that what one possesses, one can no longer desire
was at work.

Children like change - for one thing, they never anticipate regret.

I suspect victims; they win in the long run.

Everything ungirt, artless, ardent, urgent about Louie was to the fore: all over herself she gave the impression of twisted stockings.

Autumn arrives in the early morning.

Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable.

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.

Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.

The slight sense of degeneracy induced by reading novels before luncheon

All my life I have said, "Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs"
and what a mistake.

Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.

Artists were intended to be an ornament to society. As a society in themselves they are unthinkable.

No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.

What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.

Raids are slightly constipating.

Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.

Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.

She thought she need not worry about her youth; it wasted itself spontaneously, like sunshine elsewhere or firelight in an empty room.

We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.

The silence of a shut park does not sound like the country silence; it is tense and confined.

The craft of the novelist does lie first of all in story-telling.

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.

Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

As for Thomas, the longer he lived, the less he cared for the world.

Memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.

Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.

Wariness had driven away poetry; from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could.

Love dreads being isolated, being left to speak in a void
at the beginning it would often rather listen than speak.

Nobody ever dies of an indignity.

Silences can be as different as sounds.

Convention was our safeguard: could one have stronger?

One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.

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

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.