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Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.

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
Courtesy
Rome
Curiosity
Form

More quotes by 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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[A writer] should try not to be too far, personally, below the level of his work.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Often when I write I am trying to make words do the work of line and color. I have the painter's sensitivity to light. Much of my writing is verbal painting.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Plot is the knowing of destination.
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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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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Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?
Elizabeth Bowen
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Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant impossible socially, but full scale and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.
Elizabeth Bowen
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When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.
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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Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships they are quite unrelatable.
Elizabeth Bowen
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To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.
Elizabeth Bowen
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... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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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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rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate - it slid and melted away.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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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Some ideas, like dandelions in lawns, strike tenaciously: you may pull off the top but the root remains, drives down suckers and may even sprout again.
Elizabeth Bowen