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

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Revenge was a very wild kind of justice.
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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.
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... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.
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All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.
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Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
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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.
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The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.
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Sins cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life.
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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.
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Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland.
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Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?
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... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.
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very young people are true but not resounding instruments.
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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.
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... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.
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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.
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Education is not so important as people think.
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Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.
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In 'real life' everything is diluted in the novel everything is condensed.
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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.
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