Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Names
Sight
Grievous
Sense
Travel
Inexorable
Hands
Duty
Conductor
Nothing
Goes
Upper
Self
Name
Bullying
Either
Tour
Hand
Allows
Seeing
Conscience
More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen
... 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
... 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
Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.
Elizabeth Bowen
To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.
Elizabeth Bowen
Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope it is impossible.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.
Elizabeth Bowen
Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
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
fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.
Elizabeth Bowen
Plot is the knowing of destination.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.
Elizabeth Bowen
That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.
Elizabeth Bowen
Dogs are a habit, I think.
Elizabeth Bowen
If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
Elizabeth Bowen
Sins cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life.
Elizabeth Bowen
