Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

177 Sourced Quotes

Silence sat in the taxi, as though a stranger had got in.

Elizabeth Bowen
Also, perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all.

Elizabeth Bowen
History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts; it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called 'eternal.' What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.

Elizabeth Bowen
The finer the nature, and the higher the level at which it seeks to live, the lower in grief it not only sinks but dives.

Elizabeth Bowen
Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects: is this not true of fear?

Elizabeth Bowen
Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.

Elizabeth Bowen
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
One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.

Elizabeth Bowen
Without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold.

Elizabeth Bowen
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
She had to confess inexperience; her personality was still too much for her, like a punt-pole.

Elizabeth Bowen
It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.

Elizabeth Bowen
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
Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft...

Elizabeth Bowen
To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.

Elizabeth Bowen
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
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
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
All my life I have said, "Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs"--and what a mistake.

Elizabeth Bowen
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
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
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
Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man.

Elizabeth Bowen
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
I pity people who do not care for Society. They are poorer for the oblation they do not make.

Elizabeth Bowen
It appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy, little is quite impossible.

Elizabeth Bowen
Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.

Elizabeth Bowen