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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
Fighting
Physical
Lovemaking
Action
Characters
Inter
Character
Speech
Vigorous
Writing
Capable
Visible
Short
Acts

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Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.
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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.
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No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.
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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.
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But in general, for the purposes of most novelists, the number of objects genuinely necessary for. . .describing a scene will be found to be very small.
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Raids are slightly constipating.
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We are minor in everything but our passions.
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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.
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In 'real life' everything is diluted in the novel everything is condensed.
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fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.
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Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope it is impossible.
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Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
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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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...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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Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.
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... artists were intended to be an ornament to society. As a society in themselves they are unthinkable.
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The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
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No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
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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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Sins cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life.
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