Quote

[A writer] should try not to be too far, personally, below the level of his work.

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
Personally
Level
Writer
Levels
Trying
Work

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

Image
Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
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
No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Certain books come to meet me, as do people.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
... 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
Image
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.
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
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
Image
... 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
Image
... 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.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it?
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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
Image
Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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.
Elizabeth Bowen