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Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?

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
Would
Irish
Someone
Without

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

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Dogs are a habit, I think.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Jane Austen, much in advance of her day, was a mistress of the use of the dialogue. She used it as dialogue should be used-to advance the story not only to show the characters, but to advance.
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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One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
Elizabeth Bowen
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children like change - for one thing, they never anticipate regret.
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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The writer, unlike his non-writing adult friend, has no predisposed outlook he seldom observes deliberately. He sees what he didnot intend to see he remembers what does not seem wholly possible. Inattentive learner in the schoolroom of life, he keeps some faculty free to veer and wander. His is the roving 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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... 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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In 'real life' everything is diluted in the novel everything is condensed.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Disappointment tears the bearable film off life.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Nothing, that is say no one, can be such an inexorable tour-conductor as one's own conscience or sense of duty, if one allows either the upper hand: the self-bullying that goes on in the name of sight-seeing is grievous.
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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Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
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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If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Have not all poetic truths been already stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be final.
Elizabeth Bowen
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No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.
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