Quote

It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.

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
Friendship
Friend
Inspiration
Literature
Coins
Help
Pockets
Helping
Helpful
Holes
Putting

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

Image
Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
...the power-loving temperament is more dangerous when it either prefers or is forced to operate in what is materially a void. Wehave everything to dread from the dispossessed.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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
Image
Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
... it appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy, little is quite impossible.
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
For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
We desert those who desert us we cannot afford to suffer we must live how we can.
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
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.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant impossible socially, but full scale and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
I am fully intelligent only when I write. I have a certain amount of small-change intelligence, which I carry round with me as, at any rate in a town, one has to carry small money, for the needs of the day, the non-writing day. But it seems to me I seldom purely think ... if I thought more I might write less.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
The paradox of romantic love -- that what one possesses, one can no longer desire -- was at work.
Elizabeth Bowen