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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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Elizabeth Bowen
Age: 73 †
Born: 1899
Born: June 7
Died: 1973
Died: February 22
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Dublin city
Elisabeth Bowen
Reading
Book
Take
Must
Writers
Children
Grow
Grows
Creative
Though

More quotes by 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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Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market - you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane another won't get over the right stile.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Certain books come to meet me, as do people.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft.
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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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
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She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Memory must be patchy what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out - unique to oneself, one's own, one's claim to identity, it implicates one's identity in its fibbing.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Silence sat in the taxi, as though a stranger had got in.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little-even if one did once know what one meant
Elizabeth Bowen
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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.
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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All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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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We desert those who desert us we cannot afford to suffer we must live how we can.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope it is impossible.
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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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