Quote

Every love has a poetic relevance of its own each love brings to light only what to it is relevant. Outside lies the junk-yard of what does not matter.

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
Lies
Outside
Relevance
Lying
Yard
Light
Junk
Doe
Yards
Matter
Poetic
Every
Relevant
Love
Brings

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Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
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Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.
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It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.
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Characters should on the whole, be under rather than over articulate. What they intend to say should be more evident, more striking (because of its greater inner importance to the plot) than what they arrive at saying.
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Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
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The writer, unlike his non-writing adult friend, has no predisposed outlook he seldom observes deliberately. He sees what he didnot intend to see he remembers what does not seem wholly possible. Inattentive learner in the schoolroom of life, he keeps some faculty free to veer and wander. His is the roving eye.
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Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.
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Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
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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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Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?
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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.
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children like change - for one thing, they never anticipate regret.
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Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
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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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Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.
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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.
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the process of reading is reciprocal the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.
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Nothing, that is say no one, can be such an inexorable tour-conductor as one's own conscience or sense of duty, if one allows either the upper hand: the self-bullying that goes on in the name of sight-seeing is grievous.
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Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
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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.
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