Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

177 Sourced Quotes

Whenever possible I avoid talking. Reprieve from talking is my idea of a holiday. At risk of seeming unsociable, which I am, I admit I love to be left in a beatific trance, when I am in one. Friendly Romans recognize that wish.

Elizabeth Bowen
Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.

Elizabeth Bowen
Gerald's straight, round writing had, to her imagination, a queer totter, like someone running for life in tight shoes.

Elizabeth Bowen
What must novel dialogue... really be and do? It must be pointed, intentional, relevant. It must crystallize situation. It must express character. It must advance plot. During dialogue, the characters confront one another. The confrontation is in itself an occasion. Each one of these occasions, throughout the novel, is unique.

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

Elizabeth Bowen
Somehow at parties at which one stays standing up one seems to require to be more concentratedly intelligent than one does at those at which one can sit down.

Elizabeth Bowen
There are no half measures. We either have dinner or telephone the police.

Elizabeth Bowen
There are dancing motes or elements in genius which are impossible to pin down. One can only note their action, marvel at what they leave behind.

Elizabeth Bowen
She posed as being more indolent than she felt, for fear of finding herself less able than she could wish.

Elizabeth Bowen
If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.

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

Elizabeth Bowen
Rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate — it slid and melted away.

Elizabeth Bowen
Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk without loss of esteem.

Elizabeth Bowen
Very young people are true but not resounding instruments.

Elizabeth Bowen
Proximity was their support; like walls after an earthquake they could fall no further for they had fallen against each other.

Elizabeth Bowen
The slight sense of degeneracy induced by reading novels before luncheon

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

Elizabeth Bowen
Every short story is an experiment — what one must ask is not only, did it come off, but was it, as an experiment, worth making?

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

Elizabeth Bowen
Though she had never met Markie's conscience she had heard it sometimes, creeping about the house.

Elizabeth Bowen
A Bowen, in the first place, made Bowen's Court. Since then, with a rather alarming sureness, Bowen's Court has made all the succeeding Bowens.

Elizabeth Bowen
Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.

Elizabeth Bowen
Writers do not find subjects: subjects find them. There is not so much a search as a state of open susceptibility.

Elizabeth Bowen
Meetings that do not come off keep a character of their own. They stay as they were projected.

Elizabeth Bowen
She seemed to lie less in weakness than in unwilling credulity as though the successive disasters that make an illness had convinced her slowly, by repetition.

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
Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone the pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude. She had never landed at Cork, so this hill and that hill beyond were as unexpected as pictures at which you say "Oh look!" Nobody was beside her to share the moment, which would have been imperfect with anyone else there.

Elizabeth Bowen
There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

Elizabeth Bowen
She stayed bound to a gone moment, like a stopped clock with hands silently pointing an hour it cannot be.

Elizabeth Bowen
Though not all reading children grow up to be writers, I take it that most creative writers must in their day have been reading children.

Elizabeth Bowen