Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

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

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

The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaited him--a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured--captured by some experience to which one may have given hardly a thought.

writers do not find subjects: subjects find them. There is not so much a search as a state of open susceptibility.

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

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.

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

Sacrificers ... are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those that they sacrifice. Oh, the sacrificers, they get it both ways. A person knows themselves that they're able to do without.

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

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

Almost everybody wore a curious limpidity of expression, like newborn babies or souls just after death. Dazed but curiously dignified.... after a criseof hysterical revulsion and tiredness, I passed beyondand became entered by a rather sublime feeling.

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

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

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.

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

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

Nothing, that is say no one, can be such an inexorable tour-conductor as one's own conscience or sense of duty, if one allows either the upper hand: the self-bullying that goes on in the name of sight-seeing is grievous.

in my experience one thing you don't learn from is anything anyone set up to be a lesson; what you are to know you pick up as you go along.

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

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

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.

Often when I write I am trying to make words do the work of line and color. I have the painter's sensitivity to light. Much of my writing is verbal painting.

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

life is a succession of readjustments.

Dogs are a habit, I think.

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

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

With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

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

Some ideas, like dandelions in lawns, strike tenaciously: you may pull off the top but the root remains, drives down suckers and may even sprout again.

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.

nothing is more restful than conformity.

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.

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

very young people are true but not resounding instruments.

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

Plot is the knowing of destination.

The passion of vanity has its own depths in the spirit, and is powerfully militant.

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?

Meetings that do not come off keep a character of their own. They stay as they were projected.

Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland.

Raids are slightly constipating.

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

Dialogue should show the relationships among people.

It is in this unearthly first hour of spring twilight that earth's almost agonized livingness is most felt. This hour is so dreadful to some people that they hurry indoors and turn on the lights.

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.

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

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