Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Often
Verbal
Write
Sensitivity
Light
Painter
Writing
Line
Trying
Painting
Work
Color
Much
Lines
Make
Words

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

Image
rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate - it slid and melted away.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Makes of men date, like makes of car.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Sacrificers are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those they sacrifice.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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
Image
children like change - for one thing, they never anticipate regret.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
We desert those who desert us we cannot afford to suffer we must live how we can.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Characters should on the whole, be under rather than over articulate. What they intend to say should be more evident, more striking (because of its greater inner importance to the plot) than what they arrive at saying.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
... 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
Image
Plot is the knowing of destination.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Silence sat in the taxi, as though a stranger had got in.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
...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
Image
Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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
Image
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