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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.

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
Book
Furnished
Mind
Reciprocal
Formula
Formulas
Images
Reader
Reading
Process

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

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I suspect victims they win in the long run.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Education is not so important as people think.
Elizabeth Bowen
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No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life--the first twenty years of it--had about them something semi-fictitious.
Elizabeth Bowen
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nothing is more restful than conformity.
Elizabeth Bowen
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She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her.
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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We desert those who desert us we cannot afford to suffer we must live how we can.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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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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Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.
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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For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.
Elizabeth Bowen
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very young people are true but not resounding instruments.
Elizabeth Bowen
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A Bowen, in the first place, made Bowen's Court. Since then, with a rather alarming sureness, Bowen's Court has made all the succeeding Bowens.
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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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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Silence sat in the taxi, as though a stranger had got in.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Disappointment tears the bearable film off life.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
Elizabeth Bowen