Quote

Makes of men date, like makes of car.

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
Date
Car
Makes
Men
Like

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

Image
Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
This, my first [bicycle] had an intrinsic beauty. And it opened for me an era of all but flying, which roads emptily crossing theairy, gold-gorsy Common enhanced. Nothing since has equalled that birdlike freedom.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life--the first twenty years of it--had about them something semi-fictitious.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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
Image
No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
very young people are true but not resounding instruments.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Some ideas, like dandelions in lawns, strike tenaciously: you may pull off the top but the root remains, drives down suckers and may even sprout again.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
The paradox of romantic love -- that what one possesses, one can no longer desire -- was at work.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Often when I write I am trying to make words do the work of line and color. I have the painter's sensitivity to light. Much of my writing is verbal painting.
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
I suspect victims they win in the long run.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
In big houses in which things are done properly, there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Sacrificers are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those they sacrifice.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
... 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
Image
[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.
Elizabeth Bowen