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Sins cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life.

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
Class
Boldly
Society
Shortcomings
Show
Sins
Shows
Mere
Certain
Sin
Every
Cutting
Life
Level
Levels

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

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The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
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... it appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy, little is quite impossible.
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Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.
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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.
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Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little-even if one did once know what one meant
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No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
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Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
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Disappointment tears the bearable film off life.
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Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market - you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane another won't get over the right stile.
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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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Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
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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.
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in my experience one thing you don't learn from is anything anyone set up to be a lesson what you are to know you pick up as you go along.
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Education is not so important as people think.
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.
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We desert those who desert us we cannot afford to suffer we must live how we can.
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Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.
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.
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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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Childish fantasy, like the sheath over the bud, not only protects but curbs the terrible budding spirit, protects not only innocence from the world, but the world from the power of innocence.
Elizabeth Bowen