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... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.

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
Cases
Essential
Wish
Nine
Write
Ten
Felt
Essentials
Past
Oneself
Writing
Gets
Ellipsis
Make
Source
Originals
Never
Writer
Original

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very young people are true but not resounding instruments.
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Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
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Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
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After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.
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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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fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.
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It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
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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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Sacrificers are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those they sacrifice.
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The novelist's--any writer's--object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen.
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For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.
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This, my first [bicycle] had an intrinsic beauty. And it opened for me an era of all but flying, which roads emptily crossing theairy, gold-gorsy Common enhanced. Nothing since has equalled that birdlike freedom.
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... 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.
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Childish fantasy, like the sheath over the bud, not only protects but curbs the terrible budding spirit, protects not only innocence from the world, but the world from the power of innocence.
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Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Have not all poetic truths been already stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be final.
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Education is not so important as people think.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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.
Elizabeth Bowen
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... artists were intended to be an ornament to society. As a society in themselves they are unthinkable.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.
Elizabeth Bowen