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A Bowen, in the first place, made Bowen's Court. Since then, with a rather alarming sureness, Bowen's Court has made all the succeeding Bowens.

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
Made
Court
Succeed
Since
Rather
Place
Home
Sureness
Firsts
Alarming
First
Succeeding

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

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It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
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Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.
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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.
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I suspect victims they win in the long run.
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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.
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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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I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.
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All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.
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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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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memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.
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Nothing, that is say no one, can be such an inexorable tour-conductor as one's own conscience or sense of duty, if one allows either the upper hand: the self-bullying that goes on in the name of sight-seeing is grievous.
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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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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.
Elizabeth Bowen
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In 'real life' everything is diluted in the novel everything is condensed.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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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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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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.
Elizabeth Bowen
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For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.
Elizabeth Bowen