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

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

Image
Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Often when I write I am trying to make words do the work of line and color. I have the painter's sensitivity to light. Much of my writing is verbal painting.
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
Image
very young people are true but not resounding instruments.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.
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
Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
I suspect victims they win in the long run.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.
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
nobody ever dies of an indignity.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Don't you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called 'eternal.' What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Sacrificers are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those they sacrifice.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Though not all reading children grow up to be writers, I take it that most creative writers must in their day have been reading children.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Certain books come to meet me, as do people.
Elizabeth Bowen