Quote

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.

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
Thought
Outcome
Internals
Internal
Difficulties
Outcomes
Difficulty
Literature
Language
Mechanical

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

Image
It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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
Image
Plot is the knowing of destination.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.
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
Characters should on the whole, be under rather than over articulate. What they intend to say should be more evident, more striking (because of its greater inner importance to the plot) than what they arrive at saying.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Dogs are a habit, I think.
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
It is in this unearthly first hour of spring twilight that earth's almost agonized livingness is most felt. This hour is so dreadful to some people that they hurry indoors and turn on the lights.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
We desert those who desert us we cannot afford to suffer we must live how we can.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Silence sat in the taxi, as though a stranger had got in.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
very young people are true but not resounding instruments.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate - it slid and melted away.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
one should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships they are quite unrelatable. If you and I were capable of being altogether house-trained and made jolly, we should be nicer people, but not writers.
Elizabeth Bowen