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Elizabeth Bowen Quotes
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Forgiveness should be an act, but this is a state with him.
Elizabeth Bowen
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There is no doubt that sorrow brings one down in the world. The aristocratic privilege of silence belongs, you soon find out, to only the happy state or, at least, to the state when pain keeps within bounds.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Nothing, that is say no one, can be such an inexorable tour-conductor as one's own conscience or sense of duty, if one allows either the upper hand: the self-bullying that goes on in the name of sight-seeing is grievous.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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.
Elizabeth Bowen
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We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.
Elizabeth Bowen
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I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experiences, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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Short of a small range of physical acts-a fight, murder, lovemaking-dialogue is the most vigorous and visible inter-action of which characters in a novel are capable. Speech is what characters do to each other.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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.
Elizabeth Bowen
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But she had told them nothing, given them the stone of her abstract, colourless idealism while they sat there, open-mouthed for sentimental bread.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Social activity right on top of a crisis had the same effect on Cecilia nervously as, on her inside, exercise taken too soon after a meal: undigested experience hung heavily on her spirit.
Elizabeth Bowen
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He diagnosed her as prey to one creeping growth, the Past, septic with what had happened.
Elizabeth Bowen
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A romantic man often feels more uplifted with two women than with one: his love seems to hit the ideal mark somewhere between two different faces.
Elizabeth Bowen
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It is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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.
Elizabeth Bowen
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I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Goodbyes breed a sort of distaste for whomever you say goodbye to; this hurts, you feel; this must not happen again.
Elizabeth Bowen
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The silence of a shut park does not sound like the country silence; it is tense and confined.
Elizabeth Bowen
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One should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft...
Elizabeth Bowen
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It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.
Elizabeth Bowen
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No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life--the first twenty years of it--had about them something semi-fictitious.
Elizabeth Bowen
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We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.
Lady Randolph Churchill
Elizabeth Bowen
Wikipedia
Born:
June 7, 1899
Died:
February 22, 1973
(aged 73)
Bio:
Elizabeth Bowen was an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer.
Known for:
The Death of the Heart (1938)
The Heat of the Day (1948)
The Last September (1929)
The House in Paris (1926)
Eva Trout (1968)
Most used words:
people
love
children
time
novel
small
experience
day
life
characters
live
write
sense
writing
oneself
Elizabeth Bowen on Wikipedia
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