Elizabeth Bowen Quotes - Page 9

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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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Education is not so important as people think.

Elizabeth Bowen

Thinking, People, Important

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

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

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