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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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Elizabeth Bowen
Age: 73 †
Born: 1899
Born: June 7
Died: 1973
Died: February 22
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Dublin city
Elisabeth Bowen
Like
Market
Stile
Novel
Stiles
Boys
Bolt
Wrong
Lane
Making
Bolts
Another
Lanes
Right
Pigs
Writing
Driving

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

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very young people are true but not resounding instruments.
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memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.
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fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.
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After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.
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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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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.
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In 'real life' everything is diluted in the novel everything is condensed.
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Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
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That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
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Raids are slightly constipating.
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No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
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Silence sat in the taxi, as though a stranger had got in.
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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.
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Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope it is impossible.
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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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Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
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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
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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.
Elizabeth Bowen
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The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.
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