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Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

Elizabeth Bowen

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Elizabeth Bowen
Age: 73 †
Born: 1899
Born: June 7
Died: 1973
Died: February 22
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Dublin city
Elisabeth Bowen
Evocation
Mixture
Mixtures
Statement
Statements
Language

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

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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
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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
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one should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.
Elizabeth Bowen
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That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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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
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To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Plot is the knowing of destination.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.
Elizabeth Bowen
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After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.
Elizabeth Bowen
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fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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In 'real life' everything is diluted in the novel everything is condensed.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Disappointment tears the bearable film off life.
Elizabeth Bowen
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It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.
Elizabeth Bowen