Quote

Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.

Elizabeth Bowen

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Elizabeth Bowen
Age: 73 †
Born: 1899
Born: June 7
Died: 1973
Died: February 22
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Dublin city
Elisabeth Bowen
Terms
Nobody
Term
Narcissist
Life
Conceited
Narcissism
Kinder
Conceit
React

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

Image
Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
With three or more people there is something bold in the air: direct things get said which would frighten two people alone and conscious of each inch of their nearness to one another. To be three is to be in public - you feel safe.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life--the first twenty years of it--had about them something semi-fictitious.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
...the power-loving temperament is more dangerous when it either prefers or is forced to operate in what is materially a void. Wehave everything to dread from the dispossessed.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
The paradox of romantic love -- that what one possesses, one can no longer desire -- was at work.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Revenge was a very wild kind of justice.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Disappointment tears the bearable film off life.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market - you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane another won't get over the right stile.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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
Image
nothing is more restful than conformity.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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
Image
Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer's take-down of a 'real life' conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In 'real life' everything is diluted in the novel everything is condensed.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
We are minor in everything but our passions.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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.
Elizabeth Bowen