Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.

we can surmount the anger we feel. To find oneself like a young tree inside a tomb is to discover the power to crack the tomb and grow up to any height.

What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.

Art is for [the Irish] inseparable from artifice: of that, the theatre is the home. Possibly, it was England made me a novelist.

the slight sense of degeneracy induced by reading novels before luncheon

The paradox of romantic love -- that what one possesses, one can no longer desire -- was at work.

After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.

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.

Forgiveness should be an act, but this is a state with him.

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.

Silences can be as different as sounds.

Don't you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same.

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.

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.

Every love has a poetic relevance of its own; each love brings to light only what to it is relevant. Outside lies the junk-yard of what does not matter.

Wariness had driven away poetry; from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could.

to leap is not only to leap, it is to hit the ground somewhere.

... 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.

Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.

Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable. If you and I were capable of being altogether house-trained and made jolly, we should be nicer people, but not writers.

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.

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

Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant; impossible socially, but full scale; and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.