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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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Elizabeth Bowen
Age: 73 †
Born: 1899
Born: June 7
Died: 1973
Died: February 22
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Dublin city
Elisabeth Bowen
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Twenty
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Novels
More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen
... 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
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
All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
Elizabeth Bowen
A Bowen, in the first place, made Bowen's Court. Since then, with a rather alarming sureness, Bowen's Court has made all the succeeding Bowens.
Elizabeth Bowen
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
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
Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?
Elizabeth Bowen
Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
Elizabeth Bowen
... artists were intended to be an ornament to society. As a society in themselves they are unthinkable.
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
Plot is the knowing of destination.
Elizabeth Bowen
Dogs are a habit, I think.
Elizabeth Bowen
Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant impossible socially, but full scale and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.
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
But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it?
Elizabeth Bowen
Education is not so important as people think.
Elizabeth Bowen
Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
Elizabeth Bowen
The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.
Elizabeth Bowen
