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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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Elizabeth Bowen
Age: 73 †
Born: 1899
Born: June 7
Died: 1973
Died: February 22
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Dublin city
Elisabeth Bowen
Pity
Sacrifice
Ones

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

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That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Don't you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same.
Elizabeth Bowen
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The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling the wish to be seen as loved is part of one's self-respect.
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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Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
Elizabeth Bowen
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... artists were intended to be an ornament to society. As a society in themselves they are unthinkable.
Elizabeth Bowen
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With three or more people there is something bold in the air: direct things get said which would frighten two people alone and conscious of each inch of their nearness to one another. To be three is to be in public - you feel safe.
Elizabeth Bowen
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The paradox of romantic love -- that what one possesses, one can no longer desire -- was at work.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate they like to have loud chords struck on them.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.
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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We desert those who desert us we cannot afford to suffer we must live how we can.
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
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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
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The story must spring from an impression or perception pressing enough to have made the writer write. It should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Childish fantasy, like the sheath over the bud, not only protects but curbs the terrible budding spirit, protects not only innocence from the world, but the world from the power of innocence.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Though not all reading children grow up to be writers, I take it that most creative writers must in their day have been reading children.
Elizabeth Bowen
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One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
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