Quote

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
Hours
Hurry
Turns
Twilight
Felt
Lights
Light
March
Agonized
Earth
Hour
Unearthly
Firsts
Spring
Indoors
First
Turn
Springtime
People
Almost
Dreadful

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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.
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Childish fantasy, like the sheath over the bud, not only protects but curbs the terrible budding spirit, protects not only innocence from the world, but the world from the power of innocence.
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Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little-even if one did once know what one meant
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Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
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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.
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children like change - for one thing, they never anticipate regret.
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Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope it is impossible.
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I suspect victims they win in the long run.
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Revenge was a very wild kind of justice.
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Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.
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History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called 'eternal.' What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.
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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.
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Education is not so important as people think.
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Darling, I don't want you I've got no place for you I only want what you give. I don't want the whole of anyone.... What you want is the whole of me-isn't it, isn't it?-and the whole of me isn't there for anybody. In that full sense you want me I don't exist.
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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.
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Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
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Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
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All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.
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Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
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Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
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