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With three or more people there is something bold in the air: direct things get said which would frighten two people alone and conscious of each inch of their nearness to one another. To be three is to be in public - you feel safe.
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
Two
Conscious
Feel
Safe
Nearness
Feels
Relationship
Frighten
Something
Public
Inch
Things
Alone
Bold
Would
Three
Inches
People
Money
Air
Another
Direct
More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen
Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.
Elizabeth Bowen
Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
Elizabeth Bowen
The novelist's--any writer's--object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen.
Elizabeth Bowen
Imagination of my kind is most caught, most fired, most worked upon by the unfamiliar: I have thrivenon the changes and chances, the dislocations andcontrasts which have made up so much of my life.
Elizabeth Bowen
In big houses in which things are done properly, there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.
Elizabeth Bowen
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
Elizabeth Bowen
No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
Elizabeth Bowen
[A writer] should try not to be too far, personally, below the level of his work.
Elizabeth Bowen
Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.
Elizabeth Bowen
All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.
Elizabeth Bowen
life is a succession of readjustments.
Elizabeth Bowen
Don't you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same.
Elizabeth Bowen
No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life--the first twenty years of it--had about them something semi-fictitious.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
We are minor in everything but our passions.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
