Quote

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

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

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

Image
Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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
Image
Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Nothing, that is say no one, can be such an inexorable tour-conductor as one's own conscience or sense of duty, if one allows either the upper hand: the self-bullying that goes on in the name of sight-seeing is grievous.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Makes of men date, like makes of car.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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
Image
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.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
... artists were intended to be an ornament to society. As a society in themselves they are unthinkable.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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
Image
The novelist's--any writer's--object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope it is impossible.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant impossible socially, but full scale and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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
Image
Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Education is not so important as people think.
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