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The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.

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
Doe
Recount
Adds
Add
Novel
Simply
Experience

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

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Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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one should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.
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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That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
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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Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
Elizabeth Bowen
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It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.
Elizabeth Bowen
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What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.
Elizabeth Bowen
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The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance--due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author's attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful--and possibly the only--help that can be given.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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.
Elizabeth Bowen
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rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate - it slid and melted away.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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nobody ever dies of an indignity.
Elizabeth Bowen
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very young people are true but not resounding instruments.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant impossible socially, but full scale and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.
Elizabeth Bowen
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But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it?
Elizabeth Bowen
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The writer, unlike his non-writing adult friend, has no predisposed outlook he seldom observes deliberately. He sees what he didnot intend to see he remembers what does not seem wholly possible. Inattentive learner in the schoolroom of life, he keeps some faculty free to veer and wander. His is the roving eye.
Elizabeth Bowen