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Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.

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
Writers
Characters
Created
Exist
Found
Character

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

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No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
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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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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In 'real life' everything is diluted in the novel everything is condensed.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Sacrificers are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those they sacrifice.
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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Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.
Elizabeth Bowen
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The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling the wish to be seen as loved is part of one's self-respect.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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.
Elizabeth Bowen
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life is a succession of readjustments.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
Elizabeth Bowen
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I am fully intelligent only when I write. I have a certain amount of small-change intelligence, which I carry round with me as, at any rate in a town, one has to carry small money, for the needs of the day, the non-writing day. But it seems to me I seldom purely think ... if I thought more I might write less.
Elizabeth Bowen
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She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Darling, I don't want you I've got no place for you I only want what you give. I don't want the whole of anyone.... What you want is the whole of me-isn't it, isn't it?-and the whole of me isn't there for anybody. In that full sense you want me I don't exist.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
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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Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
Elizabeth Bowen