Elizabeth Bowen Quotes - Page 9

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... it appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy, little is quite impossible.

Elizabeth Bowen

Writing, Looks, Littles

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What must novel dialogue . . . really be and do? It must be pointed, intentional, relevant. It must crystallize situation. It must express character. It must advance plot. During dialogue, the characters confront one another. The confrontation is in itself an occasion. Each one of these occasions, throughout the novel, is unique.

Elizabeth Bowen

Writing, Character, Unique

Elizabeth Bowen (1950). “Collected Impressions”

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First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences, gestures, attitudes, a burning phrase with no context.

Elizabeth Bowen

Attitude, First Love, Teenage Love

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

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There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

Elizabeth Bowen

Children, Talking, Literature

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

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It is in this unearthly first hour of spring twilight that earth's almost agonized livingness is most felt. This hour is so dreadful to some people that they hurry indoors and turn on the lights.

Elizabeth Bowen

Spring, Twilight, People

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

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... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.

Elizabeth Bowen

Writing, Past, Wish

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... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.

Elizabeth Bowen

Truth, Years, Two

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Education is not so important as people think.

Elizabeth Bowen

Thinking, People, Important

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

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Nothing, that is say no one, can be such an inexorable tour-conductor as one's own conscience or sense of duty, if one allows either the upper hand: the self-bullying that goes on in the name of sight-seeing is grievous.

Elizabeth Bowen

Bullying, Travel, Sight

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the slight sense of degeneracy induced by reading novels before luncheon

Elizabeth Bowen

Reading, Reading Novels, Novel

Elizabeth Bowen (2012). “The Hotel: A Novel”, p.110, University of Chicago Press

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... in general, the Anglo-Irish do not make good dancers; they are too spritely and conscious; they are incapable of one kind of trance or of being seemingly impersonal. And, for the formal, pure dance they lack the formality: about their stylishness (for they have stylishness) there is something impromptu, slightly disorderly.

Elizabeth Bowen

Dance, Kind, Conscious

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... love dreads being isolated, being left to speak in a void -- at the beginning it would often rather listen than speak.

Elizabeth Bowen

Void, Speak, Dread

Elizabeth Bowen (2015). “The Heat Of The Day”, p.55, Random House

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Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable. If you and I were capable of being altogether house-trained and made jolly, we should be nicer people, but not writers.

Elizabeth Bowen

People, House, Solitude

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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.

Elizabeth Bowen

Clothes, Dresses, Reason

Elizabeth Bowen (1950). “Collected Impressions”

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Princess Bibesco delighted in a semi-ideal world - a world which, though having a counterpart in her experience, was to a great extent brought into being by her own temperament and, one might say, flair.

Elizabeth Bowen

Princess, World, Might

Elizabeth Bowen, Allan Hepburn (2008). “People, Places, Things: Essays”, p.255, Edinburgh University Press

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rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate - it slid and melted away.

Elizabeth Bowen

Hot, Rudeness, Manners

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

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In big houses in which things are done properly, there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.

Elizabeth Bowen

Religious, House, Feelings

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

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Almost everyone admits to hunger during the Opera.... Hunger is so exalting that during a last act you practically levitate.

Elizabeth Bowen

Opera, Lasts, Hunger

Elizabeth Bowen (1950). “Collected Impressions”

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

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