Elizabeth Bowen - Experience Quotes

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Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself — in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.

Elizabeth Bowen

The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.

Elizabeth Bowen

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

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

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

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