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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
Don't you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same.
Elizabeth Bowen
Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
Elizabeth Bowen
My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without - a so-called normal relation to society. My books are my relation to society.
Elizabeth Bowen
... it appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy, little is quite impossible.
Elizabeth Bowen
We are minor in everything but our passions.
Elizabeth Bowen
It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.
Elizabeth Bowen
Makes of men date, like makes of car.
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
Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
Elizabeth Bowen
Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.
Elizabeth Bowen
Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.
Elizabeth Bowen
very young people are true but not resounding instruments.
Elizabeth Bowen
