Elizabeth Bowen Quotes - Page 4

Quotes about:

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

Elizabeth Bowen

Fiction, Hub

ELIZABETH BOWEN (1935). “The House in Paris”

7 Copy quote
To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.

Elizabeth Bowen

People, History, Walks

ELIZABETH BOWEN (1935). “The House in Paris”

7 Copy quote
All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.

Elizabeth Bowen

Writing, Dialogue, Deals

5 Copy quote
Ghosts seem harder to please than we are; it is as though they haunted for haunting’s sake -- much as we relive, brood, and smoulder over our pasts.

Elizabeth Bowen

Past, Haunting, Sake

8 Copy quote
I do like Italian graves; they look so much more lived in.

Elizabeth Bowen

Italian, Looks, Graves

Elizabeth Bowen, Maud Ellman (2012). “The Hotel: A Novel”, p.99, University of Chicago Press

5 Copy quote
But complex people are never certain that they are not crooks, never certain their passports are quite in order, and are, therefore, unnerved by the slightest thing.

Elizabeth Bowen

Order, People, Crooks

Elizabeth Bowen (1950). “Collected Impressions”

10 Copy quote
It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.

Elizabeth Bowen

Home, Emotions Feelings, Sentiments

Elizabeth Bowen (1938). “The death of the heart”, Viking Pr

9 Copy quote
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

Solitude, Looks, Elbows

11 Copy quote
Love of privacy - perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society - has become in many people almost pathological.

Elizabeth Bowen

People, Privacy

Elizabeth Bowen (1950). “Collected Impressions”

6 Copy quote
Dogs are a habit, I think.

Elizabeth Bowen

Funny, Dog, Thinking

7 Copy quote
Almost everybody wore a curious limpidity of expression, like newborn babies or souls just after death. Dazed but curiously dignified.... after a criseof hysterical revulsion and tiredness, I passed beyondand became entered by a rather sublime feeling.

Elizabeth Bowen

Baby, Peace, War

4 Copy quote
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

Numbers, Novelists, Purpose

6 Copy quote
Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.

Elizabeth Bowen

Love, Selfishness, Impossible

Elizabeth Bowen (1938). “The death of the heart”, Viking Pr

25 Copy quote
...though one can be callous in Ireland one cannot be wholly opaque or material. An unearthly disturbance works in the spirit; reason can never reconcile one to life; nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.

Elizabeth Bowen

Opaque, Want, Spirit

Elizabeth Bowen (1998). “Bowen's Court”

4 Copy quote
But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it?

Elizabeth Bowen

Love, Ifs

Elizabeth Bowen (2015). “The Last September”, p.97, Random House

5 Copy quote
... artists were intended to be an ornament to society. As a society in themselves they are unthinkable.

Elizabeth Bowen

Artist, Ornaments, Unthinkable

5 Copy quote
... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.

Elizabeth Bowen

Fiction, Autobiography, Bounds

5 Copy quote
I suspect victims; they win in the long run.

Elizabeth Bowen

Running, Winning, Long

5 Copy quote
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

Two, People, Childhood

Elizabeth Bowen (1950). “Collected Impressions”

4 Copy quote
What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.

Elizabeth Bowen

Truth, Mean, Reality

5 Copy quote
Sins cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life.

Elizabeth Bowen

Short Life, Cutting, Class

Elizabeth Bowen (1938). “The death of the heart”, Viking Pr

5 Copy quote
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

Change, Imagination, Chance

5 Copy quote
Dress has never been at all a straightforward business: so much subterranean interest and complex feeling attaches to it. As a topic ... it has a flowery head but deep roots in the passion. On the subject of dress almost no one, for one or another reason, feels truly indifferent: if their own clothes do not concern them, somebody else's do. ... Ten minutes talk about clothes (except between perfect friends) tends to make everyone present either overbearing, guarded or touchy.

Elizabeth Bowen

Passion, Roots, Clothes

5 Copy quote
If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.

Elizabeth Bowen

Writing, Ideas, Surface

5 Copy quote
For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.

Elizabeth Bowen

People, Expectations, Realization

Elizabeth Bowen (1938). “The death of the heart”, Viking Pr

5 Copy quote

You May Also Like:

Victoria Glendinning

Rosamond Lehmann

Elizabeth Bowen

Follow

Born: June 7, 1899
Died: February 22, 1973
Occupation: Novelist
Cite this Page: Citation

Popular Topics