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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
Goes
Immortal
Crazy
Allows
Humanity
Longing
Inordinate
Story
Rational
Longings
Social
Short
Portraiture
Stories
Taste
Obstinacy
Novel
Heroism
Fiction
Behaviour
More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen
Every love has a poetic relevance of its own each love brings to light only what to it is relevant. Outside lies the junk-yard of what does not matter.
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
Certain books come to meet me, as do people.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
...the power-loving temperament is more dangerous when it either prefers or is forced to operate in what is materially a void. Wehave everything to dread from the dispossessed.
Elizabeth Bowen
Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.
Elizabeth Bowen
Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.
Elizabeth Bowen
That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
Elizabeth Bowen
Raids are slightly constipating.
Elizabeth Bowen
Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
Elizabeth Bowen
Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market - you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane another won't get over the right stile.
Elizabeth Bowen
All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.
Elizabeth Bowen
Often when I write I am trying to make words do the work of line and color. I have the painter's sensitivity to light. Much of my writing is verbal painting.
Elizabeth Bowen
It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.
Elizabeth Bowen
Darling, I don't want you I've got no place for you I only want what you give. I don't want the whole of anyone.... What you want is the whole of me-isn't it, isn't it?-and the whole of me isn't there for anybody. In that full sense you want me I don't exist.
Elizabeth Bowen
Dogs are a habit, I think.
Elizabeth Bowen
When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.
Elizabeth Bowen
Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.
Elizabeth Bowen
