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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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Elizabeth Bowen
Age: 73 †
Born: 1899
Born: June 7
Died: 1973
Died: February 22
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Dublin city
Elisabeth Bowen
Must
Claims
Something
Memory
Oneself
Identity
Unique
Alarming
Memories
Shrinks
Face
Catching
Faces
Claim
More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen
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
Dogs are a habit, I think.
Elizabeth Bowen
[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.
Elizabeth Bowen
Education is not so important as people think.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.
Elizabeth Bowen
Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
Elizabeth Bowen
one should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
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
No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
Elizabeth Bowen
Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
Elizabeth Bowen
Jane Austen, much in advance of her day, was a mistress of the use of the dialogue. She used it as dialogue should be used-to advance the story not only to show the characters, but to advance.
Elizabeth Bowen
But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it?
Elizabeth Bowen
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
Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.
Elizabeth Bowen
Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.
Elizabeth Bowen
That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
Elizabeth Bowen
Darling, I don't want you I've got no place for you I only want what you give. I don't want the whole of anyone.... What you want is the whole of me-isn't it, isn't it?-and the whole of me isn't there for anybody. In that full sense you want me I don't exist.
Elizabeth Bowen
Characters should on the whole, be under rather than over articulate. What they intend to say should be more evident, more striking (because of its greater inner importance to the plot) than what they arrive at saying.
Elizabeth Bowen
