Elizabeth Bowen Quotes - Page 7

Quotes about:

• Art is for [the Irish] inseparable from artifice: of that, the theatre is the home. Possibly, it was England made me a novelist.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Art, Home, Theatre

  6 Copy quote

• What's the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually - our sense of personality is a sense of outrage.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Country, Personality, Matter

  "The Last September". Book by Elizabeth Bowen, 1929.

  9 Copy quote

• I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experiences, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Memories, Powerful, Half

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• Memory must be patchy; what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out - unique to oneself, one's own, one's claim to identity, it implicates one's identity in its fibbing.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Memories, Unique, Identity

  5 Copy quote

• ... into the novel goes such taste as I have for rational behaviour and social portraiture. The short story, as I see it to be, allows for what is crazy about humanity: obstinacies, inordinate heroisms, "immortal longings.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Crazy, Humanity, Taste

  Elizabeth Bowen (1959). “Stories”

  4 Copy quote

• The passion of vanity has its own depths in the spirit, and is powerfully militant.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Passion, Vanity, Depth

  Elizabeth Bowen (1949). “The cat jumps, and other stories”

  4 Copy quote

• Wariness had driven away poetry; from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Feelings, Moments, Driven

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

  5 Copy quote

• Have not all poetic truths been already stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be final.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Essence, Finals, Poetic

  Elizabeth Bowen (1950). “Collected Impressions”

  4 Copy quote

• Often when I write I am trying to make words do the work of line and color. I have the painter's sensitivity to light. Much of my writing is verbal painting.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Writing, Light, Color

  4 Copy quote

• [My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Fiction, Stories, Knows

  4 Copy quote

• Grown-up people seem to be busy by clockwork... They run their unswerving course from object to object, directed by some mysterious inner needle that points all the time to what they must do next. You can only marvel at such misuse of time.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Running, Time, People

  4 Copy quote

• fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Fashion, Abstract, Persons

  Elizabeth Bowen (1950). “Collected Impressions”

  4 Copy quote

• Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Art, Crafts, Novel

  5 Copy quote

• in my experience one thing you don't learn from is anything anyone set up to be a lesson; what you are to know you pick up as you go along.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Learning, Growth, Lessons

  4 Copy quote

• children like change - for one thing, they never anticipate regret.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Children, Regret, Anticipate

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

  4 Copy quote

• Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Love, Lonely, Pain

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

  10 Copy quote

• Expectations are the most perilous form of dream, and when dreams do realise themselves it is in the waking world: the difference is subtly but often painfully felt.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Dream, Differences, Expectations

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

  4 Copy quote

• One's sentiments -- call them that -- one's fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: only when they are betrayed or, worse still, when one betrays them does one realize their power.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Doe, Betrayed, Realizing

  5 Copy quote

• Childish fantasy, like the sheath over the bud, not only protects but curbs the terrible budding spirit, protects not only innocence from the world, but the world from the power of innocence.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Bud, World, Spirit

  Elizabeth Bowen (2015). “The Death Of The Heart”, p.326, Random House

  4 Copy quote

• There is no doubt that sorrow brings one down in the world. The aristocratic privilege of silence belongs, you soon find out, to only the happy state- or, at least, to the state when pain keeps within bounds.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Pain, Silence, Doubt

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

  5 Copy quote

• Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant; impossible socially, but full scale; and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Depression, Giants, Impossible

  5 Copy quote

• Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Elizabeth Bowen (2015). “The House In Paris”, p.88, Random House

  4 Copy quote

• The Irish landowner, partly from laziness but also from an indifferent delicacy, does not interfere in the lives of the people round. Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland, but these cannot operate the whole time: on the whole, the landowner leaves his tenants and work-people to make their own mistakes, while he makes his.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Sports, Mistake, Two

  4 Copy quote

• Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie; when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Ties, Remember, Tradition

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

  5 Copy quote

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