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Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant impossible socially, but full scale and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.
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
Keep
Depression
Lunatic
Sometimes
Psychological
Knocking
Keeps
Socially
Inside
Utter
Hear
Giant
Full
Giants
Battering
Sort
Scale
Banter
Impossible
Scales
Banality
More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen
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
...the power-loving temperament is more dangerous when it either prefers or is forced to operate in what is materially a void. Wehave everything to dread from the dispossessed.
Elizabeth Bowen
Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.
Elizabeth Bowen
The paradox of romantic love -- that what one possesses, one can no longer desire -- was at work.
Elizabeth Bowen
Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
Elizabeth Bowen
... artists were intended to be an ornament to society. As a society in themselves they are unthinkable.
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
The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling the wish to be seen as loved is part of one's self-respect.
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
A Bowen, in the first place, made Bowen's Court. Since then, with a rather alarming sureness, Bowen's Court has made all the succeeding Bowens.
Elizabeth Bowen
When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.
Elizabeth Bowen
Have not all poetic truths been already stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be final.
Elizabeth Bowen
... into the novel goes such taste as I have for rational behaviour and social portraiture. The short story, as I see it to be, allows for what is crazy about humanity: obstinacies, inordinate heroisms, immortal longings.
Elizabeth Bowen
Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.
Elizabeth Bowen
I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.
Elizabeth Bowen
Certain books come to meet me, as do people.
Elizabeth Bowen
Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
Elizabeth Bowen
one should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.
Elizabeth Bowen
fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.
Elizabeth Bowen
the process of reading is reciprocal the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.
Elizabeth Bowen