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one should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.

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
Difficulties
Difficulty
Trouble
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More quotes by 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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No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
Elizabeth Bowen
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For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.
Elizabeth Bowen
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All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without - a so-called normal relation to society. My books are my relation to society.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
Elizabeth Bowen
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If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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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
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In 'real life' everything is diluted in the novel everything is condensed.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships they are quite unrelatable.
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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Raids are slightly constipating.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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We desert those who desert us we cannot afford to suffer we must live how we can.
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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children like change - for one thing, they never anticipate regret.
Elizabeth Bowen