Quote

What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.

Elizabeth Bowen

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

Image
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
Image
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
Image
No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
In 'real life' everything is diluted in the novel everything is condensed.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
... 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
Image
Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Dogs are a habit, I think.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
The paradox of romantic love -- that what one possesses, one can no longer desire -- was at work.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Raids are slightly constipating.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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
Image
Jane Austen, much in advance of her day, was a mistress of the use of the dialogue. She used it as dialogue should be used-to advance the story not only to show the characters, but to advance.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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
Image
After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships they are quite unrelatable. If you and I were capable of being altogether house-trained and made jolly, we should be nicer people, but not writers.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
nobody ever dies of an indignity.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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
Image
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