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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.

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
Final
Finals
Essence
Already
Stated
Truth
Poetic
Statement
Truths
Statements

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

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Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope it is impossible.
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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[A writer] should try not to be too far, personally, below the level of his work.
Elizabeth Bowen
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It is in this unearthly first hour of spring twilight that earth's almost agonized livingness is most felt. This hour is so dreadful to some people that they hurry indoors and turn on the lights.
Elizabeth Bowen
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This, my first [bicycle] had an intrinsic beauty. And it opened for me an era of all but flying, which roads emptily crossing theairy, gold-gorsy Common enhanced. Nothing since has equalled that birdlike freedom.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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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Short of a small range of physical acts-a fight, murder, lovemaking-dialogue is the most vigorous and visible inter-action of which characters in a novel are capable. Speech is what characters do to each other.
Elizabeth Bowen
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children like change - for one thing, they never anticipate regret.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
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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Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
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
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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
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All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.
Elizabeth Bowen
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... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Imagination of my kind is most caught, most fired, most worked upon by the unfamiliar: I have thrivenon the changes and chances, the dislocations andcontrasts which have made up so much of my life.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Silence sat in the taxi, as though a stranger had got in.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Disappointment tears the bearable film off life.
Elizabeth Bowen
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One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
Elizabeth Bowen