Elizabeth Bowen Quotes - Page 5

Quotes about:

• 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

• 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

• 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

• ... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Fiction, Autobiography, Bounds

  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

• 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

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• 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”

  5 Copy quote

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

  Elizabeth Bowen

  War, People, London

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• very young people are true but not resounding instruments.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  People, Youth, Instruments

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

  6 Copy quote

• nobody ever dies of an indignity.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Embarrassment, Dies, Indignity

  Elizabeth Bowen (1950). “Collected Impressions”

  5 Copy quote

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

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Sacrifice, Pity

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• Revenge was a very wild kind of justice.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Revenge, Justice, Kind

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

  5 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

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• Bring all your intelligence to bear on your beginning.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Writing, Bears

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Rome, Curiosity, Courtesy

  5 Copy quote

• Convention was our safeguard: could one have stronger?

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Stronger, Conventions

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

  4 Copy quote

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

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Leap

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

  4 Copy quote

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