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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
Always
Wealth
Cycle
Things
Feeling
Observed
Religious
Cycles
Bigs
Houses
House
Properly
Feelings
Element
Done
Servant
Work
Elements
Servants

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

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[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.
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
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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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For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Sins cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Short of a small range of physical acts-a fight, murder, lovemaking-dialogue is the most vigorous and visible inter-action of which characters in a novel are capable. Speech is what characters do to each other.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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Makes of men date, like makes of car.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Every love has a poetic relevance of its own each love brings to light only what to it is relevant. Outside lies the junk-yard of what does not matter.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
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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Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.
Elizabeth Bowen
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life is a succession of readjustments.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Certain books come to meet me, as do people.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Dogs are a habit, I think.
Elizabeth Bowen
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The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope it is impossible.
Elizabeth Bowen