Elizabeth Bowen
Full Name: Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen
Birthdate: June 7, 1899
Birthplace: Dublin, Ireland
Date of Death: February 22, 1973
Occupation: Author and Short-Story Writer
Profile: Best known for
The Heat of the Day.
Website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Bowen
Number of Quotes: 102
All I can do is to make a shot at what I feel. Criticism is analysis, and it demands a colder mood than I am in now.
All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by
Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.
Art is a summary of the creator's attitude to life.
Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
At any moment we may be robbed of everything. That being so, how can one talk of owning
anything? The whole of life is a
queer, quick slant of things: a shift of shadows, a shaft of sunlight, and then, not moments, but whole great sweeps of darkness.
Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone.
Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
Becoming a writer is not a career
but something that will mark you for life.
Belief in the supernatural is a confession of a failed sense of humor.
Bowen's
characters are never free of history; it presses on them, invisibly and relentlessly.
Paraphrased critical remark sometimes misquoted as direct speech; included here only when attributed
to Bowen herself in essays.
Conversation is a game of circles.
Death is so simple. Life is so complicated.
Education is not so important as people think.
Every image, every idea, is a bridge, and only by crossing bridges can we make meanings.
Experience isn't interesting till it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.
Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.
Few people, at the bottom, really want to hear the truth—it is generally
unwelcome, and they are aware that it is likely to be something they have always known.
Fiction is a way of feeling your way into the truth.
Genius... is the ability to prolong one's childhood, to carry its freshness and wonder into adult life.
He had a cold, and looked like a sick bird.
He looked as if he had been washed up on the beach, a survivor from a shipwreck of unknown magnitude.
He was the kind of man who could make a woman feel like a hotel room he had thought better of renting.
Health of mind is the ability to entertain reality.
Her eyes looked like pieces of a newspaper that had been left out in the rain.
Her laugh broke off as a plate breaks; it was a shocking sound.
Her thoughts moved like a disturbed wasps' nest.
Home is not where one was born; home is where all one's attempts to escape cease.
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated.
Houses are bodies: we are their souls.
I am myself a place.
I am not a believer
in the sense that I subscribe to any dogma, but I feel an
intense curiosity about the nature of things and the mystery of human existence.
I am not a film star. I am a character actress. I look like a writer.
I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.
I have always thought that unclouded truth is never to be found by persistent interrogation.
I have a feeling that once you are married you are no longer friends, you are accomplices.
I never feel I am dealing with the past at all. The present is so powerful, it has such a grip on one.
I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.
Identity is not given once and for all; it is built up.
If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.
If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.
In a way, everything interesting happens in the dark.
Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
It is about everything that I cannot express.
It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
It is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.
It is only by being isolated that we develop character.
Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
Life is, at most, a fragment—a fragment between two oblivions.
Love is a belief, not an appetite.
Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.
Memory is not passive; it is active, a shaping force.
Memory is not what we remember, but that which remembers us. Memory is a present that never stops passing.
Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.
No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
No sooner do I set foot in Ireland than I become a different person.
No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.
Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.
Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
Nothing in life is impersonal. The personal is the only clue we have to the nature of everything.
Nothing is more frightening than the idea of a complete order.
Nothing makes one feel so strong as a call for help.
One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
One cannot love without the terror of being vulnerable.
Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.
Reality is something that must be probed and searched for.
Self-expression is a need that comes after, not before, the event.
She looked as if she had been kept in a cardboard box and only taken out on special occasions.
Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.
The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy, and temperamental: it rejects
the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.
The fatal futility of Fact.
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
The house had its own life, its own secrets, which it guarded.
The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.
The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.
The journalist is the street-cleaner of literature.
The novel lies nearest to life.
The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend to remember.
The poison of the past into the present.
The sooner you betray someone, the sooner you can be faithful to someone else.
The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved is part of one's self-respect.
The writer's business is to feel intensely and to observe closely.
There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
There is no substitute for the luxury of being oneself.
This is how it is with a wound. The wound heals, yet a scar remains.
Time is the great element of tragedy.
We are all alone in our own skins. We die alone.
We are minor in everything but our passions.
When you have committed a crime, you either run away or you try to forget it.
When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.
Who is ever adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't.
Writers do not need friends as much as they need witnesses.
You cannot decide to believe. You believe, or you do not believe.
Last on Earth
