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Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

Elizabeth Bowen

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Elizabeth Bowen
Age: 73 †
Born: 1899
Born: June 7
Died: 1973
Died: February 22
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Dublin city
Elisabeth Bowen
Loneliness
Enemy
Envied
Alone
Smiling
Feeling
Jealousy
Feelings
Jealous
Enemies
Envy

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Some ideas, like dandelions in lawns, strike tenaciously: you may pull off the top but the root remains, drives down suckers and may even sprout again.
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The novelist's--any writer's--object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen.
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I suspect victims they win in the long run.
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Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope it is impossible.
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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.
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Dogs are a habit, I think.
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Roughly, the action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown. In the first half of a novel, the unpredictability should be the more striking. In the second half, the inevitability should be the more striking.
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When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.
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Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
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Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
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Sins cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life.
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Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.
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Plot is the knowing of destination.
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That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
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... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.
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Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.
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the process of reading is reciprocal the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.
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To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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.
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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.
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