Elizabeth Bowen Quotes - Page 5

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• I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Character, Directors, Literature

  Elizabeth Bowen (1975). “Pictures and conversations”, Knopf Books for Young Readers

  8 Copy quote

• The paradox of romantic love -- that what one possesses, one can no longer desire -- was at work.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Romantic Love, Desire, Paradox

  Elizabeth Bowen (1975). “Pictures and conversations”, Lane, Allen

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• When I read a story, I relive the moment from which it sprang. A scene burned itself into me, a building magnetized me, a mood orseason of Nature's penetrated me, history suddenly appeared to me in some tiny act, or a face had begun to haunt me before I glanced at it.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Live In The Moment, Stories, Tiny

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• ...there must be something she wanted; and that therefore she was no lady.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Wanted

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

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• As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Passion, Character, History

  9 Copy quote

• No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Fate, Eden, Picnics

  'Out of a Book' in 'Orion III' (ed. Rosamund Lehmann et al, 1946)

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• Style is the thing that's always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Writing, Style, Phony

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

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• Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  War, People, London

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• every short story is an experiment - what one must ask is not only, did it come off, but was it, as an experiment, worth making?

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Stories, Short Story, Experiments

  Elizabeth Bowen (1959). “Stories”

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• Forgiveness should be an act, but this is a state with him.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Forgiveness, States, Should

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

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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

  Writing, Character, Fighting

  Elizabeth Bowen (2015). “The Mulberry Tree”, p.41, Random House

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• 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

  Writing, Intelligent, Thinking

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• The novelist's--any writer's--object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Mean, Novelists, Doe

  Elizabeth Bowen (1950). “Collected Impressions”

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• Each piece of dialogue MUST be "something happening". . .The "amusing" for its OWN sake should above all be censored. . .The functional use of dialogue for the plot must be the first thing in the writer's mind. Where functional usefulness cannot be established, dialogue must be left out.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Mind, Pieces, Sake

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• the process of reading is reciprocal; the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Book, Reading, Mind

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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

  Suffering, Noise, Indifference

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• very young people are true but not resounding instruments.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  People, Youth, Instruments

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

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• After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Air, Important, Guarantees

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• Revenge was a very wild kind of justice.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Revenge, Justice, Kind

  Elizabeth Bowen (2006). “The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen”, Anchor

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• Sacrificers are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those they sacrifice.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Sacrifice, Pity

  4 Copy quote

• We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Survival, Suffering, Desert

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

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• Convention was our safeguard: could one have stronger?

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Stronger, Conventions

  Elizabeth Bowen (1978). “Elizabeth Bowen's Irish Stories”

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• The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Long Distance Relationship, Heart, Thinking

  Death of the Heart (1938) pt. 2, ch. 2

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• Knowledge of Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain through the thinning shoe-leather. ... When it comes to knowing, the senses are more honest than the intelligence. Nothing is more real than the first wall you lean up against sobbing with exhaustion. Rome no more than beheld (that is, taken in through the eyes only) could still be a masterpiece in cardboard - the eye I suppose being of all the organs the most easily infatuated and then jaded and so tricked. Seeing is pleasure, but not knowledge.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Travel, Wall, Real

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• To the sun Rome owes its underlying glow, and its air called golden - to me, more the yellow of white wine; like wine it raises agreeability to poetry.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Wine, Air, Rome

  Elizabeth Bowen (2015). “A Time In Rome”, p.58, Random House

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