Elizabeth Bowen Quotes - Page 6

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Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

Elizabeth Bowen

Jealousy, Loneliness, Envy

House in Paris (1935) pt. 2, ch. 8

59 Copy quote
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

Drama, Book, Night

Elizabeth Bowen (2015). “A Time In Rome”, p.10, Random House

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Bring all your intelligence to bear on your beginning.

Elizabeth Bowen

Writing, Bears

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We have really no absent friends.

Elizabeth Bowen

Absence, Absent Friends, Absent

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

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to leap is not only to leap, it is to hit the ground somewhere.

Elizabeth Bowen

Leap

Elizabeth Bowen (1952). “The house in Paris”

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Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland.

Elizabeth Bowen

Sports, Two, Ireland

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

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Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.

Elizabeth Bowen

Rome, Curiosity, Courtesy

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Disappointment tears the bearable film off life.

Elizabeth Bowen

Disappointment, Tears, Film

"The House in Paris".

16 Copy quote
There's something so showy about desperation, it takes hard wits to see it's a grandiose form of funk.

Elizabeth Bowen

Hope, Expectations, Desperation

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

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Good-byes breed a sort of distaste for whomever you say good-bye to; this hurts, you feel, this must not happen again.

Elizabeth Bowen

Inspirational, Goodbye, Hurt

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

8 Copy quote
She had one of those charming faces which, according to the angle from which you see them, look either melancholy or impertinent. Her eyes were grey; her trick of narrowing them made her seem to reflect, the greater part of the time, in the dusk of her second thoughts. With that mood, that touch of arriere pensee, went an uncertain, speaking set of lips.

Elizabeth Bowen

Eye, Looks, Faces

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Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.

Elizabeth Bowen

Running, Loneliness, Long

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

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The most steady, the most self-sufficient nature depends, more than it knows, on its few chosen stimuli.

Elizabeth Bowen

Self, Stimulus, Chosen

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

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With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

Elizabeth Bowen

Children, Taken, Talking

The House in Paris pt. 1, ch. 2 (1935)

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

Elizabeth Bowen

War, Mistake, Tables And Chairs

Elizabeth Bowen (2015). “The Mulberry Tree”, p.177, Random House

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Makes of men date, like makes of car.

Elizabeth Bowen

Men, Car

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

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Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer's take-down of a 'real life' conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.

Elizabeth Bowen

Real, Writing, Would Be

Elizabeth Bowen (1950). “Collected Impressions”

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Don't you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same.

Elizabeth Bowen

Language, Currency, Shops

Elizabeth Bowen (1949). “The Heat of the Day”, Jonathan Cape

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Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.

Elizabeth Bowen

Want, Reason, Reconcile

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

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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

Real, Character, Years

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

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The story must spring from an impression or perception pressing enough to have made the writer write. It should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure.

Elizabeth Bowen

Spring, Writing, Giving

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Meetings that do not come off keep a character of their own. They stay as they were projected.

Elizabeth Bowen

Character, Meetings

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

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People in love, in whom every sense is open, cannot beat off the influence of a place.

Elizabeth Bowen

People, Influence, Beats

Elizabeth Bowen (2015). “The House In Paris”, p.146, Random House

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Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.

Elizabeth Bowen

Clothes, Wish, Battle

Elizabeth Bowen (1950). “Collected Impressions”

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A novel which survives, which withstands and outlives time, does do something more than merely survive. It does not stand still. It accumulates round itself the understanding of all these persons who bring to it something of their own. It acquires associations, it becomes a form of experience in itself, so that two people who meet can often make friends, find an approach to each other, because of this one great common experience they have had.

Elizabeth Bowen

Reading, Two, People

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

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