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Elizabeth Bowen

ft

Quotes
58

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
Elizabeth Bowen
Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
Elizabeth Bowen
Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
Elizabeth Bowen
The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.
Elizabeth Bowen
Education is not so important as people think.
Elizabeth Bowen
Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.
Elizabeth Bowen
It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
Elizabeth Bowen
Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
Elizabeth Bowen
No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
Elizabeth Bowen
Fantasy is toxic the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
Elizabeth Bowen
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
Elizabeth Bowen
Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
Some people are molded by their admirations others by their hostilities.
Elizabeth Bowen
When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.
Elizabeth Bowen
Autumn arrives in the early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
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
Meetings that do not come off keep a character of their own. They stay as they were projected.
Elizabeth Bowen
We are minor in everything but our passions.
Elizabeth Bowen
Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
Elizabeth Bowen
Dialogue should show the relationships among people.
Elizabeth Bowen
Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
Elizabeth Bowen
Autumn arrives in the early morning but spring at the close of a winter day.
Elizabeth Bowen
The craft of the novelist does lie first of all in story telling.
Elizabeth Bowen
Never to lie is to have no lock to your door, you are never wholly alone.
Elizabeth Bowen
Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.
Elizabeth Bowen
All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.
Elizabeth Bowen
I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.
Elizabeth Bowen
If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
Elizabeth Bowen
Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.
Elizabeth Bowen
Fate is not an eagle it creeps like a rat.
Elizabeth Bowen
There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.
Elizabeth Bowen
Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
Elizabeth Bowen
It is not our exalted feelings it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.
Elizabeth Bowen
Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
Elizabeth Bowen
Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted when you find it taken for granted you are unnerved.
Elizabeth Bowen
If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.
Elizabeth Bowen
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.
Elizabeth Bowen
The charm one might say the genius of memory is that it is choosy chancy and temperamental it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.
Elizabeth Bowen
Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
Elizabeth Bowen
The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.
Elizabeth Bowen
Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
Elizabeth Bowen
Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
Elizabeth Bowen
Dialogue should convey a sense of spontaneity but eliminate the repetitiveness of real talk.
Elizabeth Bowen
One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
Elizabeth Bowen
Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.
Elizabeth Bowen
Disappointment tears the bearable film of life.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
Elizabeth Bowen
Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.
Elizabeth Bowen
Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.
Elizabeth Bowen
Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.
Elizabeth Bowen

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