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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
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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
House
Properly
Feelings
Element
Done
Servant
Work
Elements
Servants
Always
Wealth
Cycle
Things
Feeling
Observed
Religious
Cycles
Bigs
Houses
More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen
The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
Revenge was a very wild kind of justice.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
We desert those who desert us we cannot afford to suffer we must live how we can.
Elizabeth Bowen
Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.
Elizabeth Bowen
Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
Elizabeth Bowen
Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.
Elizabeth Bowen
Sacrificers are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those they sacrifice.
Elizabeth Bowen
Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?
Elizabeth Bowen
The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance--due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author's attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful--and possibly the only--help that can be given.
Elizabeth Bowen
[A writer] should try not to be too far, personally, below the level of his work.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
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
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
children like change - for one thing, they never anticipate regret.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
We are minor in everything but our passions.
Elizabeth Bowen
That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
Elizabeth Bowen
The novelist's--any writer's--object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen.
Elizabeth Bowen
