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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
Discuss
Difficulties
Difficulty
Trouble

More quotes by 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.
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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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
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fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.
Elizabeth Bowen
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It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
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.
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
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Though not all reading children grow up to be writers, I take it that most creative writers must in their day have been reading children.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
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.
Elizabeth Bowen
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What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.
Elizabeth Bowen
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The paradox of romantic love -- that what one possesses, one can no longer desire -- was at work.
Elizabeth Bowen
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After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.
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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Raids are slightly constipating.
Elizabeth Bowen
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... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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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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Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope it is impossible.
Elizabeth Bowen
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children like change - for one thing, they never anticipate regret.
Elizabeth Bowen