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Dogs are a habit, I think.

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
Habit
Funny
Think
Thinking
Dogs
Dog

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

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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.
Elizabeth Bowen
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All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Disappointment tears the bearable film off life.
Elizabeth Bowen
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All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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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Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft.
Elizabeth Bowen
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... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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.
Elizabeth Bowen
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It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
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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fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.
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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Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.
Elizabeth Bowen
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... it appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy, little is quite impossible.
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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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