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Short of a small range of physical acts-a fight, murder, lovemaking-dialogue is the most vigorous and visible inter-action of which characters in a novel are capable. Speech is what characters do to each other.

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
Novel
Dialogue
Fight
Range
Small
Murder
Physical
Lovemaking
Fighting
Characters
Inter
Action
Speech
Vigorous
Character
Capable
Visible
Writing
Short
Acts

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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.
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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.
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The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.
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No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
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All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
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One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
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nobody ever dies of an indignity.
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For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.
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Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
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Imagination of my kind is most caught, most fired, most worked upon by the unfamiliar: I have thrivenon the changes and chances, the dislocations andcontrasts which have made up so much of my life.
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Don't you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same.
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Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
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Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland.
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Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.
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Some ideas, like dandelions in lawns, strike tenaciously: you may pull off the top but the root remains, drives down suckers and may even sprout again.
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... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.
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... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.
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At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial games could be played.
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Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.
Elizabeth Bowen
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rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate - it slid and melted away.
Elizabeth Bowen