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 BowenGhosts seem harder to please than we are; it is as though they haunted for hauntingโs sake -- much as we relive, brood, and smoulder over our pasts.
Elizabeth BowenSacrificers ... 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.
Elizabeth BowenWhat 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 BowenThe 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.
Elizabeth Bowen