Quote

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

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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
May
Sucker
Ideas
Drives
Even
Strike
Tenaciously
Like
Root
Suckers
Pull
Sprout
Strikes
Dandelions
Roots
Sprouts
Remains
Lawns

More quotes by 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.
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Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
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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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Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
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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
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We desert those who desert us we cannot afford to suffer we must live how we can.
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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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Makes of men date, like makes of car.
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If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
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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.
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Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer's take-down of a 'real life' conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In 'real life' everything is diluted in the novel everything is condensed.
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Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.
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Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?
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Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope it is impossible.
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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.
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Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
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... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.
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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.
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Have not all poetic truths been already stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be final.
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Plot is the knowing of destination.
Elizabeth Bowen