Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

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

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

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.

The story must spring from an impression or perception pressing enough to have made the writer write. It should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure.

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.

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.

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

There's something so showy about desperation, it takes hard wits to see it's a grandiose form of funk.

First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences, gestures, attitudes, a burning phrase with no context.

Education is not so important as people think.

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

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

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

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

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

When one is a child, the disposition of objects, tables and chairs and doors, seems part of the natural order: a house-move lets in chaos - as it does for a dog.

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

It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.

But in general, for the purposes of most novelists, the number of objects genuinely necessary for. . .describing a scene will be found to be very small.

... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.

Makes of men date, like makes of car.

Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie; when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.

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.

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.

The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.

Jane Austen, much in advance of her day, was a mistress of the use of the dialogue. She used it as dialogue should be used-to advance the story; not only to show the characters, but to advance.

In big houses in which things are done properly, there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.

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

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.

Dialogue is the ideal means of showing what is between the characters. It crystallizes relationships. It should, ideally, be so effective as to make analysis or explanation of the relationships between the characters unnecessary.

Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.

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

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

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.

...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.

With three or more people there is something bold in the air: direct things get said which would frighten two people alone and conscious of each inch of their nearness to one another. To be three is to be in public - you feel safe.

I am fully intelligent only when I write. I have a certain amount of small-change intelligence, which I carry round with me as, at any rate in a town, one has to carry small money, for the needs of the day, the non-writing day. But it seems to me I seldom purely think ... if I thought more I might write less.

One can suffer a convulsion of one's entire nature, and, unless it makes some noise, no one notices. It's not just that we are incurious; we completely lack any sense of each other's existences.

...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.

Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market - you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane; another won't get over the right stile.

Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.

Bring all your intelligence to bear on your beginning.

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

Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.

... 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.

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

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

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