Quote

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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Elizabeth Bowen
Age: 73 †
Born: 1899
Born: June 7
Died: 1973
Died: February 22
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Dublin city
Elisabeth Bowen
Think
Money
Carry
Thinking
Thought
Rate
Purely
Certain
Intelligence
Seldom
Seems
Intelligent
Round
Change
Amount
Rounds
Might
Small
Town
Needs
Less
Towns
Writing
Write
Fully

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We desert those who desert us we cannot afford to suffer we must live how we can.
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Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
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To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.
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Plot is the knowing of destination.
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fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.
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The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance--due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author's attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful--and possibly the only--help that can be given.
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In big houses in which things are done properly, there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.
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Some ideas, like dandelions in lawns, strike tenaciously: you may pull off the top but the root remains, drives down suckers and may even sprout again.
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Sins cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life.
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Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
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Makes of men date, like makes of car.
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All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
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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.
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Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope it is impossible.
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Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.
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That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
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We are minor in everything but our passions.
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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.
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Sacrificers are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those they sacrifice.
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Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.
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