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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.

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
Social
Short
Portraiture
Stories
Taste
Obstinacy
Novel
Heroism
Fiction
Behaviour
Goes
Immortal
Crazy
Allows
Humanity
Longing
Inordinate
Story
Rational
Longings

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

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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
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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.
Elizabeth Bowen
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To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.
Elizabeth Bowen
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At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial games could be played.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Plot is the knowing of destination.
Elizabeth Bowen
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[A writer] should try not to be too far, personally, below the level of his work.
Elizabeth Bowen
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For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Memory must be patchy what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out - unique to oneself, one's own, one's claim to identity, it implicates one's identity in its fibbing.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
Elizabeth Bowen
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nobody ever dies of an indignity.
Elizabeth Bowen
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But in general, for the purposes of most novelists, the number of objects genuinely necessary for. . .describing a scene will be found to be very small.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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.
Elizabeth Bowen
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The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance--due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author's attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful--and possibly the only--help that can be given.
Elizabeth Bowen
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No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life--the first twenty years of it--had about them something semi-fictitious.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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.
Elizabeth Bowen