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... artists were intended to be an ornament to society. As a society in themselves they are unthinkable.

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
Artists
Society
Artist
Ornament
Ornaments
Unthinkable
Intended

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

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Disappointment tears the bearable film off life.
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 paradox of romantic love -- that what one possesses, one can no longer desire -- was at work.
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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When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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We are minor in everything but our passions.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope it is impossible.
Elizabeth Bowen
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If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Raids are slightly constipating.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Education is not so important as people think.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships they are quite unrelatable.
Elizabeth Bowen
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life is a succession of readjustments.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Short of a small range of physical acts-a fight, murder, lovemaking-dialogue is the most vigorous and visible inter-action of which characters in a novel are capable. Speech is what characters do to each other.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.
Elizabeth Bowen
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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
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fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.
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