Elizabeth Bowen famous quotes

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

#Love #Relationship #Crush

We are minor in everything but our passions.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Passion #Literature #Minors

Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Character #People #Admiration

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

#Love #Selfishness #Impossible

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

#Art #Feelings #Literature

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

#Educational #Ideas #Shadow

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

#Men #Two #Faces

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Jealousy #Loneliness #Envy

She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Girl #Expression #Photograph

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

#Character #Directors #Literature

Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Character #Fiction #Crafts

Ghosts seem harder to please than we are; it is as though they haunted for haunting’s sake -- much as we relive, brood, and smoulder over our pasts.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Past #Haunting #Sake

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

#Break Up #Heart #Adequate

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

#Goodbye #Hurt #Good Bye

She had one of those charming faces which, according to the angle from which you see them, look either melancholy or impertinent. Her eyes were grey; her trick of narrowing them made her seem to reflect, the greater part of the time, in the dusk of her second thoughts. With that mood, that touch of arriere pensee, went an uncertain, speaking set of lips.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Eye #Looks #Faces

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

#People #History #Walks

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

#Life #Positive Attitude #Diversity

Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Time #Morning #Spring

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

#Writing #Paper #Littles

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

#Fate #Destiny #Eagles

The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Writing #Literature #Firsts

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

#Character #Found

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

#Unique #Ideas #People

It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Friendship #Inspiration #Pockets

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

#War #People #Towns

We have really no absent friends.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Absence #Absent

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

#Change #Imagination #Chance

... artists were intended to be an ornament to society. As a society in themselves they are unthinkable.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Artist #Ornaments #Unthinkable

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

#Passion #May #Habit

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

#Garden #Games #Childhood

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.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Fate #Eden #Picnics

I am dead against art's being self-expression. I see an inherent failure in any story which fails to detach itself from the author-detach itself in the sense that a well-blown soap-bubble detaches itself from the bowl of the blower's pipe and spherically takes off into the air as a new, whole, pure, iridescent world. Whereas the ill-blown bubble, as children know, timidly adheres to the bowl's lip, then either bursts or sinks flatly back again.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Art #Children #Air

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

#Freedom #Flying #Gold

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Heart #Thinking #People

Dogs are a habit, I think.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Funny #Dog #Thinking

Dialogue should show the relationships among people.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Writing #People #Should

On the subject of dress almost no one, for one or another reason, feels truly indifferent: if their own clothes do not concern them, somebody else's do.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Clothes #Dresses #Reason

Certain books come to meet me, as do people.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Book #Reading #People

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

#Live In The Moment #Stories #Tiny

Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Silence #Speak #Climax

...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

#Power #Void #Dangerous

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

#Real #Character #Years

The short story is at an advantage over the novel, and can claim its nearer kinship to poetry, because it must be more concentrated, can be more visionary, and is not weighed down (as the novel is bound to be) by facts, explanation, or analysis. I do not mean to say that the short story is by any means exempt from the laws of narrative: it must observe them, but on its own terms.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Mean #Law #Facts

As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Passion #Character #History

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

#Writing #Thoughtful #Thinking

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

#Writing #Style #Phony

Roughly, the action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown. In the first half of a novel, the unpredictability should be the more striking. In the second half, the inevitability should be the more striking.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Character #Half #Firsts

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

#Stories #Short Story #Experiments

I suspect victims; they win in the long run.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Running #Winning #Long

Silences can be as different as sounds.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Silence #Sound #Different

Sins cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Short Life #Cutting #Class

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

#Self #Stimulus #Chosen

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

#Book #Reading #Mind

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

#Memories #Unique #Identity

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

#Memories #Powerful #Half

What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Truth #Mean #Reality

... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Truth #Years #Two

A novel which survives, which withstands and outlives time, does do something more than merely survive. It does not stand still. It accumulates round itself the understanding of all these persons who bring to it something of their own. It acquires associations, it becomes a form of experience in itself, so that two people who meet can often make friends, find an approach to each other, because of this one great common experience they have had ...
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Reading #Two #People

... in general, the Anglo-Irish do not make good dancers; they are too spritely and conscious; they are incapable of one kind of trance or of being seemingly impersonal. And, for the formal, pure dance they lack the formality: about their stylishness (for they have stylishness) there is something impromptu, slightly disorderly.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Dance #Kind #Conscious

...though one can be callous in Ireland one cannot be wholly opaque or material. An unearthly disturbance works in the spirit; reason can never reconcile one to life; nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Opaque #Want #Spirit

... 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

#Crazy #Humanity #Taste

... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Fiction #Autobiography

The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance--due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author's attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful--and possibly the only--help that can be given.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Irrelevance #Criticism #Novelists

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

#Fiction #Stories

The writer, unlike his non-writing adult friend, has no predisposed outlook; he seldom observes deliberately. He sees what he didnot intend to see; he remembers what does not seem wholly possible. Inattentive learner in the schoolroom of life, he keeps some faculty free to veer and wander. His is the roving eye.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Writing #Eye #Adults

... 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

#Writing #Looks #Littles

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

#Art #Home #Theatre

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

#Mean #Novelists #Doe

[A writer] should try not to be too far, personally, below the level of his work.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Trying #Levels #Should

... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Writing #Past #Wish

Silence sat in the taxi, as though a stranger had got in.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Silence #Stranger #Taxi

But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it?
-- Elizabeth Bowen

Raids are slightly constipating.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Mixtures #Language

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

#Lying #Doors #Locks

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

#Degrees #Literature #Shapes

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

#Fiction

The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Lying #Two #Literature

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

#Respect #Self #Feelings

There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Children #Talking #Literature

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

#Want #Reason #Reconcile

...there must be something she wanted; and that therefore she was no lady.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Wanted

the slight sense of degeneracy induced by reading novels before luncheon
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Reading #Novel

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

#Littles #Waste #Firsts

Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#Women #Literature #Intimacy

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

#Thinking #Literature #Shows

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

#Opera #Lasts #Hunger

I pity people who do not care for Society. They are poorer for the oblation they do not make.
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#People #Care #Pity

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

#War #Mistake #World

Ghosts, we hope, may be always with us--that is, never too far out of the reach of fancy. On the whole, it would seem they adapt themselves well, perhaps better than we do, to changing world conditions--they enlarge their domain, shift their hold on our nerves, and, dispossessed of one habitat, set up house in another. The universal battiness of our century looks like providing them with a propitious climate ...
-- Elizabeth Bowen

#House #World #May