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Elizabeth Bowen Quotes
177 Sourced Quotes
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I pity people who do not care for Society. They are poorer for the oblation they do not make.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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.
Elizabeth Bowen
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The short story is at an advantage over the novel, and can claim its nearer kinship to poetry, because it must be more concentrated, can be more visionary, and is not weighed down (as the novel is bound to be) by facts, explanation, or analysis. I do not mean to say that the short story is by any means exempt from the laws of narrative: it must observe them, but on its own terms.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Into the novel goes such taste as I have for rational behaviour and social portraiture. The short story, as I see it to be, allows for what is crazy about humanity: obstinacies, inordinate heroisms, "immortal longings.
Elizabeth Bowen
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All my life I have said, "Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs"--and what a mistake.
Elizabeth Bowen
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In nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate; they like to have loud chords struck on them.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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.
Elizabeth Bowen
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To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.
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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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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It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.
Elizabeth Bowen
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She had to confess inexperience; her personality was still too much for her, like a punt-pole.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Characters should on the whole, be under rather than over articulate. What they intend to say should be more evident, more striking (because of its greater inner importance to the plot) than what they arrive at saying.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold.
Elizabeth Bowen
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One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
Elizabeth Bowen
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She liked to receive confidences if these were conferred prettily, with some suggestion of her own specialness, not dropped on her toes all anyhow, like a bulky valise someone is anxious to put down.
Elizabeth Bowen
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I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.
Elizabeth Bowen
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In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Cecilia's lunch party, having heard through the open door the first phrase of the interlude, had exchanged less than a glance and, all raising their voices, maintained a strenuous conversation till she came back. They were not English for nothing.
Elizabeth Bowen
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"What's the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually— our sense of personality is a sense of outrage and we'll never get outside of it." But the hold of the country was that, she considered, it could be thought of in terms of oneself, so interpreted.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Some ideas, like dandelions in lawns, strike tenaciously: you may pull off the top but the root remains, drives down suckers and may even sprout again.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Let's face it — who ever is adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
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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