Catherine Drinker Bowen Quotes

15 Sourced Quotes

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Catherine Drinker Bowen
There is a marvelous turn and trick to British arrogance; its apparent unconsciousness makes it twice as effectual.

Catherine Drinker Bowen
If art has a purpose, it is to interpret life, reproduce it in fresh visions.

Catherine Drinker Bowen
Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.

Catherine Drinker Bowen
Biographers, by their very nature, want to know everything about everybody, dead or alive.

Catherine Drinker Bowen
Great artists treasure their time with a bitter and snarling miserliness.

Catherine Drinker Bowen
Artists often think they are going to die before their time. They seem to possess a heightened sense of the passing of the hours.

Catherine Drinker Bowen
Your concert-goer, though he feed upon symphony as a lamb upon milk, is no true lover if he play no instrument. Your true lover does more than admire the muse; he sweats a little in her service.

Catherine Drinker Bowen
History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.

Catherine Drinker Bowen
One quality music, alone among the arts, possesses — a warm, a satisfying friendliness. All the other arts are lonely. We paint alone — my picture, my interpretation of the sky. My poem, my novel. But in music — ensemble music, not soloism — we share. No altruism this, for we receive tenfold what we give.

Catherine Drinker Bowen
One of the marks of true genius is a quality of abundance. A rich, rollicking abundance, enough to give indigestion to ordinary people. Great artists turn it out in rolls, in swatches. They cover whole ceilings with paintings, they chip out a mountainside in stone, they write not one novel but a shelf full.

Catherine Drinker Bowen
In early days, I tried not to give librarians any trouble, which was where I made my primary mistake. Librarians like to be given trouble; they exist for it, they are geared to it.

Catherine Drinker Bowen
For the location of a mislaid volume, an uncatalogued item, your good librarian has a ferret's nose. Give her a scent and she jumps the leash, her eye bright with battle.

Catherine Drinker Bowen
It is a great, a pleasant thing to have a friend with whom to walk, untroubled, through the woods, by the stream, saying nothing, at peace--the heart all clean and quiet and empty, ready for the spirit that may choose to be its guest.

Catherine Drinker Bowen
People who carry a musical soul about them are, I think, more receptive than others. They smile more readily. One feels in them a pleasant propensity toward the lesser sins, a pleasing readiness also to admit the possibility that on occasion they may be in the wrong--they may be mistaken.

Catherine Drinker Bowen