Elizabeth Bowen Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Elizabeth Bowen on Wise Famous Quotes.
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.
Rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate - it slid and melted away.
There must be perfect towns where shadows were strong like buildings, towns secret without coldness, unaware without indifference.
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.
Almost everyone admits to hunger during the Opera ... Hunger is so exalting that during a last act you practically levitate.
All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
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.
Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.
To foresee pleasures makes anybody a poet ... to seek pleasure makes a hero of anyone: you open yourself so entirely to fate.
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.
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.
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.
Also, perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all.
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 ...
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.
Everything ungirt, artless, ardent, urgent about Louie was to the fore: all over herself she gave the impression of twisted stockings.
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.
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.
All my life I have said, "Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs"
and what a mistake.
and what a mistake.
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.
She thought she need not worry about her youth; it wasted itself spontaneously, like sunshine elsewhere or firelight in an empty room.
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?
Love dreads being isolated, being left to speak in a void
at the beginning it would often rather listen than speak.
at the beginning it would often rather listen than speak.