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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
Process
Book
Furnished
Mind
Reciprocal
Formula
Formulas
Images
Reader
Reading

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

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History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called 'eternal.' What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.
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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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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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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Raids are slightly constipating.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.
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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one should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.
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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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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Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
Elizabeth Bowen
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The story must spring from an impression or perception pressing enough to have made the writer write. It should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure.
Elizabeth Bowen
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nobody ever dies of an indignity.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.
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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Revenge was a very wild kind of justice.
Elizabeth Bowen
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very young people are true but not resounding instruments.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.
Elizabeth Bowen