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Elizabeth Bowen Quotes
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The slight sense of degeneracy induced by reading novels before luncheon
Elizabeth Bowen
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The paradox of romantic love — that what one possesses, one can no longer desire — was at work.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Though she had never met Markie's conscience she had heard it sometimes, creeping about the house.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Writers do not find subjects: subjects find them. There is not so much a search as a state of open susceptibility.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Meetings that do not come off keep a character of their own. They stay as they were projected.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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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
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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
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There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.
Elizabeth Bowen
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She stayed bound to a gone moment, like a stopped clock with hands silently pointing an hour it cannot be.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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The coldness had been admitted by none of the seven or eight people who, in degrees of elderly beauty, sat here full in the sun, at this sheltered edge of the lawn: they continued to master the coldness, or to deny it, as though with each it were some secret malaise.
Elizabeth Bowen
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And yet in a way I would rather fail point blank. Things one can do have no value. I don't mind feeling small myself, but I dread finding the world is.
Elizabeth Bowen
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The children worked on each other like two indestructible pieces of sand-paper.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Looking back at a repetition of empty days, one sees that monuments have sprung up. Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie: when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.
Elizabeth Bowen
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In big houses in which things are done properly, there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Two things are terrible in childhood: helplessness (being in other people's power) and apprehension — the apprehension that something is being concealed from us because it is too bad to be told.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Going to meet a stranger or semi-stranger, can you help asking yourself what they are coming to meet?
Elizabeth Bowen
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There's something so showy about desperation, it takes hard wits to see it's a grandiose form of funk.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Sacrificers... are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those that they sacrifice. Oh, the sacrificers, they get it both ways. A person knows themselves that they're able to do without.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Often when I write I am trying to make words do the work of line and color. I have the painter's sensitivity to light. Much... of my writing is verbal painting.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Quote of the day
Joy is like restless day; but peace divine Like quiet night; Lead me, O Lord, — till perfect Day shall shine Through Peace to Light.
Adelaide Anne Procter
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:
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Elizabeth Bowen on Wikipedia
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