Quote

In 'real life' everything is diluted in the novel everything is condensed.

Elizabeth Bowen

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Elizabeth Bowen
Age: 73 †
Born: 1899
Born: June 7
Died: 1973
Died: February 22
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Dublin city
Elisabeth Bowen
Condensed
Diluted
Novel
Everything
Real
Life

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

Image
To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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
Image
Education is not so important as people think.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Disappointment tears the bearable film off life.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Jane Austen, much in advance of her day, was a mistress of the use of the dialogue. She used it as dialogue should be used-to advance the story not only to show the characters, but to advance.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
nobody ever dies of an indignity.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
Elizabeth Bowen