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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.

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
Growth
Learning
Anyone
Learn
Lesson
Experience
Pick
Anything
Picks
Thing
Lessons
Along

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

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the process of reading is reciprocal the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.
Elizabeth Bowen
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All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.
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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Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.
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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Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships they are quite unrelatable.
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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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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Sacrificers are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those they sacrifice.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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.
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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At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial games could be played.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Certain books come to meet me, as do people.
Elizabeth Bowen
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life is a succession of readjustments.
Elizabeth Bowen
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When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.
Elizabeth Bowen
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nobody ever dies of an indignity.
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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I suspect victims they win in the long run.
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