Elizabeth Bowen Quotes - Page 6

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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

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

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Sports, Two, Ireland

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

  5 Copy quote

• We have really no absent friends.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Absence, Absent Friends, Absent

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

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  10 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

  8 Copy quote

• Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Jealousy, Loneliness, Envy

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

  57 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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”

  7 Copy quote

• 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”

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• 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”

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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”

  5 Copy quote

• 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)

  7 Copy quote

• Raids are slightly constipating.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• Story involves action. Action towards an end not to be foreseen (by the reader) but also towards an end which, having been reached, must be seen to have been from the start inevitable.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Stories, Action, Ends

  Elizabeth Bowen (1950). “Collected Impressions”

  4 Copy quote

• With three or more people there is something bold in the air: direct things get said which would frighten two people alone and conscious of each inch of their nearness to one another. To be three is to be in public - you feel safe.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Relationship, Money, Air

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

  11 Copy quote

• Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Country, Literature, Married

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

  7 Copy quote

• Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  War, Brain, Toxic

  Elizabeth Bowen (2015). “Bowen's Court & Seven Winters”, p.221, Random House

  8 Copy quote

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