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First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences, gestures, attitudes, a burning phrase with no context.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
Elizabeth Bowen
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The heart may think it knows better: The senses know that absence blots people out. We have really no absent friends.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Memory must be patchy; what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out — unique to oneself, one's own, one's claim to identity, it implicates one's identity in its fibbing.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Love dreads being isolated, being left to speak in a void — at the beginning it would often rather listen than speak.
Elizabeth Bowen
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To leap is not only to leap, it is to hit the ground somewhere.
Elizabeth Bowen
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The most steady, the most self-sufficient nature depends, more than it knows, on its few chosen stimuli.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Story involves action. Action towards an end not to be foreseen (by the reader) but also towards an end which, having been reached, must be seen to have been from the start inevitable.
Elizabeth Bowen
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In my experience one thing you don't learn from is anything anyone set up to be a lesson; what you are to know you pick up as you go along.
Elizabeth Bowen
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The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaited him—a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured—captured by some experience to which one may have given hardly a thought.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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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Quote of the day
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
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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