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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
Born
Substitute
May
Substitutes
Book
Relation
Without
Prepared
Writing
Normal
Something
Called
Think
Books
Thinking
Society
More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen
very young people are true but not resounding instruments.
Elizabeth Bowen
Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
... 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
No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
With three or more people there is something bold in the air: direct things get said which would frighten two people alone and conscious of each inch of their nearness to one another. To be three is to be in public - you feel safe.
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
Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
Elizabeth Bowen
nothing is more restful than conformity.
Elizabeth Bowen
Certain books come to meet me, as do people.
Elizabeth Bowen
For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.
Elizabeth Bowen
... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.
Elizabeth Bowen
life is a succession of readjustments.
Elizabeth Bowen
Silence sat in the taxi, as though a stranger had got in.
Elizabeth Bowen
Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
Elizabeth Bowen
