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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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Elizabeth Bowen
Age: 73 †
Born: 1899
Born: June 7
Died: 1973
Died: February 22
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Dublin city
Elisabeth Bowen
Without
Prepared
Writing
Normal
Called
Something
Books
Think
Society
Thinking
Born
Substitute
May
Substitutes
Book
Relation
More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen
Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer's take-down of a 'real life' conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In 'real life' everything is diluted in the novel everything is condensed.
Elizabeth Bowen
No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.
Elizabeth Bowen
To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.
Elizabeth Bowen
Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
Elizabeth Bowen
Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling the wish to be seen as loved is part of one's self-respect.
Elizabeth Bowen
History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called 'eternal.' What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.
Elizabeth Bowen
Makes of men date, like makes of car.
Elizabeth Bowen
Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.
Elizabeth Bowen
memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.
Elizabeth Bowen
one should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.
Elizabeth Bowen
It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
Elizabeth Bowen
She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
nothing is more restful than conformity.
Elizabeth Bowen
I suspect victims they win in the long run.
Elizabeth Bowen
Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
Elizabeth Bowen
Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
Elizabeth Bowen
Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
Elizabeth Bowen
