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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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Elizabeth Bowen
Age: 73 †
Born: 1899
Born: June 7
Died: 1973
Died: February 22
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Dublin city
Elisabeth Bowen
Found
Else
Anything
Hidden
Keeps
Somewhere

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

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With three or more people there is something bold in the air: direct things get said which would frighten two people alone and conscious of each inch of their nearness to one another. To be three is to be in public - you feel safe.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Don't you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same.
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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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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Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.
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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I am fully intelligent only when I write. I have a certain amount of small-change intelligence, which I carry round with me as, at any rate in a town, one has to carry small money, for the needs of the day, the non-writing day. But it seems to me I seldom purely think ... if I thought more I might write less.
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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Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland.
Elizabeth Bowen
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The paradox of romantic love -- that what one possesses, one can no longer desire -- was at 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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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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Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?
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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... into the novel goes such taste as I have for rational behaviour and social portraiture. The short story, as I see it to be, allows for what is crazy about humanity: obstinacies, inordinate heroisms, immortal longings.
Elizabeth Bowen
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No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.
Elizabeth Bowen
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nobody ever dies of an indignity.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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