Elizabeth Bowen - Small Quotes

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Often intimacies between women go backwards, beginning with revelations and ending up in small talk.

Elizabeth Bowen

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

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

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

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

I am fully intelligent only when I write. I have a certain amount of small-change intelligence, which I carry round with me as, at any rate in a town, one has to carry small money, for the needs of the day, the non-writing day. But it seems to me I seldom purely think... if I thought more I might write less.

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