Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Elizabeth Bowen
Age: 73 †
Born: 1899
Born: June 7
Died: 1973
Died: February 22
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Dublin city
Elisabeth Bowen
Sort
Scale
Banter
Impossible
Scales
Banality
Keep
Depression
Lunatic
Sometimes
Psychological
Knocking
Keeps
Socially
Inside
Utter
Hear
Giant
Full
Giants
Battering
More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen
The writer, unlike his non-writing adult friend, has no predisposed outlook he seldom observes deliberately. He sees what he didnot intend to see he remembers what does not seem wholly possible. Inattentive learner in the schoolroom of life, he keeps some faculty free to veer and wander. His is the roving eye.
Elizabeth Bowen
Sacrificers are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those they sacrifice.
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
Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market - you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane another won't get over the right stile.
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
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.
Elizabeth Bowen
Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.
Elizabeth Bowen
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.
Elizabeth Bowen
Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
Elizabeth Bowen
[A writer] should try not to be too far, personally, below the level of his work.
Elizabeth Bowen
memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.
Elizabeth Bowen
Certain books come to meet me, as do people.
Elizabeth Bowen
nobody ever dies of an indignity.
Elizabeth Bowen
But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it?
Elizabeth Bowen
Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
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 early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.
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
Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.
Elizabeth Bowen
Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
Elizabeth Bowen