Quote

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

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Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.
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We are minor in everything but our passions.
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In 'real life' everything is diluted in the novel everything is condensed.
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Plot is the knowing of destination.
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Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships they are quite unrelatable.
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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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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 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.
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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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... 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.
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[A writer] should try not to be too far, personally, below the level of his work.
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nobody ever dies of an indignity.
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Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
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With three or more people there is something bold in the air: direct things get said which would frighten two people alone and conscious of each inch of their nearness to one another. To be three is to be in public - you feel safe.
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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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Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.
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Though not all reading children grow up to be writers, I take it that most creative writers must in their day have been reading children.
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Certain books come to meet me, as do people.
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If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
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Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?
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