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

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Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
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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.
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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.
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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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History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called 'eternal.' What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.
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For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.
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Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.
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The writer, unlike his non-writing adult friend, has no predisposed outlook he seldom observes deliberately. He sees what he didnot intend to see he remembers what does not seem wholly possible. Inattentive learner in the schoolroom of life, he keeps some faculty free to veer and wander. His is the roving eye.
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In 'real life' everything is diluted in the novel everything is condensed.
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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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After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.
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But in general, for the purposes of most novelists, the number of objects genuinely necessary for. . .describing a scene will be found to be very small.
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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.
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The paradox of romantic love -- that what one possesses, one can no longer desire -- was at work.
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Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.
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Makes of men date, like makes of car.
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Dogs are a habit, I think.
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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.
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memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.
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in my experience one thing you don't learn from is anything anyone set up to be a lesson what you are to know you pick up as you go along.
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