Quote

Dogs are a habit, I think.

Elizabeth Bowen

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Elizabeth Bowen
Age: 73 †
Born: 1899
Born: June 7
Died: 1973
Died: February 22
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Dublin city
Elisabeth Bowen
Think
Thinking
Dogs
Dog
Habit
Funny

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

Image
... 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.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it?
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
We are minor in everything but our passions.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships they are quite unrelatable.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Memory must be patchy what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out - unique to oneself, one's own, one's claim to identity, it implicates one's identity in its fibbing.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Roughly, the action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown. In the first half of a novel, the unpredictability should be the more striking. In the second half, the inevitability should be the more striking.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
... artists were intended to be an ornament to society. As a society in themselves they are unthinkable.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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
Image
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
Image
That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
[A writer] should try not to be too far, personally, below the level of his work.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
in my experience one thing you don't learn from is anything anyone set up to be a lesson what you are to know you pick up as you go along.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Silence sat in the taxi, as though a stranger had got in.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
life is a succession of readjustments.
Elizabeth Bowen