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Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

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
War
Heated
World
Toxic
Cruelty
Fantasy
Private
Brain
Literature
Start

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The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.
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My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without - a so-called normal relation to society. My books are my relation to society.
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The story must spring from an impression or perception pressing enough to have made the writer write. It should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure.
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Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.
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nobody ever dies of an indignity.
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Certain books come to meet me, as do people.
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To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.
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Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.
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No, 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.
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Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft.
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Don't you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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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Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
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Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
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Jane Austen, much in advance of her day, was a mistress of the use of the dialogue. She used it as dialogue should be used-to advance the story not only to show the characters, but to advance.
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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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Short of a small range of physical acts-a fight, murder, lovemaking-dialogue is the most vigorous and visible inter-action of which characters in a novel are capable. Speech is what characters do to each other.
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In big houses in which things are done properly, there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.
Elizabeth Bowen
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At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial games could be played.
Elizabeth Bowen
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... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.
Elizabeth Bowen