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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
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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
Earth
Hour
Unearthly
Firsts
Spring
Indoors
First
Turn
Springtime
People
Almost
Dreadful
Hours
Hurry
Turns
Twilight
Felt
Lights
Light
March
Agonized
More quotes by 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
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
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
Makes of men date, like makes of car.
Elizabeth Bowen
[A writer] should try not to be too far, personally, below the level of his work.
Elizabeth Bowen
Raids are slightly constipating.
Elizabeth Bowen
children like change - for one thing, they never anticipate regret.
Elizabeth Bowen
Jane Austen, much in advance of her day, was a mistress of the use of the dialogue. She used it as dialogue should be used-to advance the story not only to show the characters, but to advance.
Elizabeth Bowen
Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.
Elizabeth Bowen
Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer's take-down of a 'real life' conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In 'real life' everything is diluted in the novel everything is condensed.
Elizabeth Bowen
Every love has a poetic relevance of its own each love brings to light only what to it is relevant. Outside lies the junk-yard of what does not matter.
Elizabeth Bowen
We are minor in everything but our passions.
Elizabeth Bowen
Nothing, that is say no one, can be such an inexorable tour-conductor as one's own conscience or sense of duty, if one allows either the upper hand: the self-bullying that goes on in the name of sight-seeing is grievous.
Elizabeth Bowen
This, my first [bicycle] had an intrinsic beauty. And it opened for me an era of all but flying, which roads emptily crossing theairy, gold-gorsy Common enhanced. Nothing since has equalled that birdlike freedom.
Elizabeth Bowen
Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
Elizabeth Bowen
life is a succession of readjustments.
Elizabeth Bowen
But in general, for the purposes of most novelists, the number of objects genuinely necessary for. . .describing a scene will be found to be very small.
Elizabeth Bowen
Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
Elizabeth Bowen
Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships they are quite unrelatable.
Elizabeth Bowen
Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?
Elizabeth Bowen
