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Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.

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
Great
Ireland
Married
Literature
Dies
Country

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

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The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance--due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author's attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful--and possibly the only--help that can be given.
Elizabeth Bowen
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[A writer] should try not to be too far, personally, below the level of his work.
Elizabeth Bowen
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That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Certain books come to meet me, as do people.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little-even if one did once know what one meant
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.
Elizabeth Bowen
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All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
Elizabeth Bowen
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It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.
Elizabeth Bowen