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All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.

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
Unprecedented
Dialogue
Perhaps
Deals
Writing
Something
Good

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

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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.
Elizabeth Bowen
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memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.
Elizabeth Bowen
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The story must spring from an impression or perception pressing enough to have made the writer write. It should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer's take-down of a 'real life' conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In 'real life' everything is diluted in the novel everything is condensed.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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We are minor in everything but our passions.
Elizabeth Bowen
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... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.
Elizabeth Bowen
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The novelist's--any writer's--object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Childish fantasy, like the sheath over the bud, not only protects but curbs the terrible budding spirit, protects not only innocence from the world, but the world from the power of innocence.
Elizabeth Bowen
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[A writer] should try not to be too far, personally, below the level of his work.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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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.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope it is impossible.
Elizabeth Bowen
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The paradox of romantic love -- that what one possesses, one can no longer desire -- was at work.
Elizabeth Bowen
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nobody ever dies of an indignity.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships they are quite unrelatable. If you and I were capable of being altogether house-trained and made jolly, we should be nicer people, but not writers.
Elizabeth Bowen
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one should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.
Elizabeth Bowen
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My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without - a so-called normal relation to society. My books are my relation to society.
Elizabeth Bowen