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People who carry a musical soul about them are, I think, more receptive than others. They smile more readily. One feels in them a pleasant propensity toward the lesser sins, a pleasing readiness also to admit the possibility that on occasion they may be in the wrong--they may be mistaken.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

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Catherine Drinker Bowen
Age: 76 †
Born: 1897
Born: January 1
Died: 1973
Died: November 1
Biographer
Historian
Novelist
Violinist
Writer
Haverford
Pennsylvania
Catherine Shober Drinker
Also
Carry
Readiness
May
Musical
Pleasing
Soul
Smile
Occasion
Feels
Sin
Mistaken
Think
Toward
Sins
Propensity
Thinking
Possibility
Occasions
Receptive
People
Wrong
Admit
Lesser
Others
Pleasant
Readily

More quotes by Catherine Drinker Bowen

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History is, in its essence, exciting to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.
Catherine Drinker Bowen
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Artists often think they are going to die before their time. They seem to possess a heightened sense of the passing of the hours.
Catherine Drinker Bowen
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Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.
Catherine Drinker Bowen
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What pioneer ever had chart and a lighthouse to steer by?
Catherine Drinker Bowen
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I have noted that, barring accidents, artists whose powers wear best and last longest are those who have trained themselves to work under adversity. Great artists treasure their time with a bitter and snarling miserliness.
Catherine Drinker Bowen
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A woman's biography - with about eight famous historical exceptions - so often turns out to be the story of a man and the woman who helped his career.
Catherine Drinker Bowen
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Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.
Catherine Drinker Bowen
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Chamber music - a conversation between friends.
Catherine Drinker Bowen
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Many a man who has known himself at ten forgets himself utterly between ten and thirty.
Catherine Drinker Bowen
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There is a marvelous turn and trick to British arrogance its apparent unconsciousness makes it twice as effectual.
Catherine Drinker Bowen
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All the others arts are lonely. We paint alone--my picture, my interpretation of the sky. My poem, my novel. But in music--ensemble music, not soloism--we share. No altruism this, for we receive tenfold what we give.
Catherine Drinker Bowen
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What the writer needs is an empty day ahead.
Catherine Drinker Bowen
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In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.
Catherine Drinker Bowen
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It is a great, a pleasant thing to have a friend with whom to walk, untroubled, through the woods, by the stream, saying nothing, at peace--the heart all clean and quiet and empty, ready for the spirit that may choose to be its guest.
Catherine Drinker Bowen