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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
Novel
Heroism
Fiction
Behaviour
Goes
Immortal
Crazy
Allows
Humanity
Longing
Inordinate
Story
Rational
Longings
Social
Short
Portraiture
Stories
Taste
Obstinacy
More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen
Roughly, the action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown. In the first half of a novel, the unpredictability should be the more striking. In the second half, the inevitability should be the more striking.
Elizabeth Bowen
Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?
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
After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.
Elizabeth Bowen
Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
Elizabeth Bowen
[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.
Elizabeth Bowen
The paradox of romantic love -- that what one possesses, one can no longer desire -- was at work.
Elizabeth Bowen
If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
Elizabeth Bowen
Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope it is impossible.
Elizabeth Bowen
We are minor in everything but our passions.
Elizabeth Bowen
Nothing, that is say no one, can be such an inexorable tour-conductor as one's own conscience or sense of duty, if one allows either the upper hand: the self-bullying that goes on in the name of sight-seeing is grievous.
Elizabeth Bowen
Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.
Elizabeth Bowen
Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
Elizabeth Bowen
It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
Elizabeth Bowen
In 'real life' everything is diluted in the novel everything is condensed.
Elizabeth Bowen
fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.
Elizabeth Bowen
Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships they are quite unrelatable.
Elizabeth Bowen
History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called 'eternal.' What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.
Elizabeth Bowen
Sacrificers are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those they sacrifice.
Elizabeth Bowen
... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.
Elizabeth Bowen
