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Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.

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
Speak
Silences
Climax
Silence

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

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For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.
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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... 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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Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.
Elizabeth Bowen
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A Bowen, in the first place, made Bowen's Court. Since then, with a rather alarming sureness, Bowen's Court has made all the succeeding Bowens.
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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Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.
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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When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?
Elizabeth Bowen
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Education is not so important as people think.
Elizabeth Bowen
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No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
Elizabeth Bowen
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The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.
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
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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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Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.
Elizabeth Bowen
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At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial games could be played.
Elizabeth Bowen