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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.
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
Course
Novelist
Possible
Finest
Point
Novelists
Doe
Object
Mean
Meaning
Objects
Writer
Whittle
Courses
Sharpen
More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen
Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
Elizabeth Bowen
Plot is the knowing of destination.
Elizabeth Bowen
Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
Elizabeth Bowen
Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships they are quite unrelatable. If you and I were capable of being altogether house-trained and made jolly, we should be nicer people, but not writers.
Elizabeth Bowen
Education is not so important as people think.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.
Elizabeth Bowen
Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
Elizabeth Bowen
Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.
Elizabeth Bowen
Certain books come to meet me, as do people.
Elizabeth Bowen
Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships they are quite unrelatable.
Elizabeth Bowen
Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
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
Have not all poetic truths been already stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be final.
Elizabeth Bowen
The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling the wish to be seen as loved is part of one's self-respect.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.
Elizabeth Bowen
The story must spring from an impression or perception pressing enough to have made the writer write. It should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure.
Elizabeth Bowen
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.
Elizabeth Bowen