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
Difficulty
Literature
Language
Mechanical
Thought
Outcome
Internals
Internal
Difficulties
Outcomes

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

Image
It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Certain books come to meet me, as do people.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
nothing is more restful than conformity.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Plot is the knowing of destination.
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
In 'real life' everything is diluted in the novel everything is condensed.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Makes of men date, like makes of car.
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
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.
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
Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Sacrificers are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those they sacrifice.
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
Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Memory must be patchy what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out - unique to oneself, one's own, one's claim to identity, it implicates one's identity in its fibbing.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships they are quite unrelatable.
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
Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope it is impossible.
Elizabeth Bowen