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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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rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate - it slid and melted away.
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Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.
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But in general, for the purposes of most novelists, the number of objects genuinely necessary for. . .describing a scene will be found to be very small.
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Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
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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.
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Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?
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Plot is the knowing of destination.
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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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in my experience one thing you don't learn from is anything anyone set up to be a lesson what you are to know you pick up as you go along.
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... into the novel goes such taste as I have for rational behaviour and social portraiture. The short story, as I see it to be, allows for what is crazy about humanity: obstinacies, inordinate heroisms, immortal longings.
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life is a succession of readjustments.
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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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When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.
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But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it?
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Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.
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Childish fantasy, like the sheath over the bud, not only protects but curbs the terrible budding spirit, protects not only innocence from the world, but the world from the power of innocence.
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Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.
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Education is not so important as people think.
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What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.
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The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
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