Quote

If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.

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
Looks
Alarm
Way
Alarms
Always
Diversity
Life
Advice
Cause
Causes
Culture
Look

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

Image
Imagination of my kind is most caught, most fired, most worked upon by the unfamiliar: I have thrivenon the changes and chances, the dislocations andcontrasts which have made up so much of my life.
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
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
Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
nothing is more restful than conformity.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Certain books come to meet me, as do people.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
... 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.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
life is a succession of readjustments.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
children like change - for one thing, they never anticipate regret.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Dogs are a habit, I think.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
The paradox of romantic love -- that what one possesses, one can no longer desire -- was at work.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Nothing, that is say no one, can be such an inexorable tour-conductor as one's own conscience or sense of duty, if one allows either the upper hand: the self-bullying that goes on in the name of sight-seeing is grievous.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her.
Elizabeth Bowen