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Imagination of my kind is most caught, most fired, most worked upon by the unfamiliar: I have thrivenon the changes and chances, the dislocations andcontrasts which have made up so much of my life.
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
Life
Worked
Imagination
Dislocations
Chance
Dislocation
Upon
Unfamiliar
Change
Fired
Much
Chances
Made
Caught
Kind
Changes
More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen
Don't you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same.
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
fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.
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
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
Certain books come to meet me, as do people.
Elizabeth Bowen
Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.
Elizabeth Bowen
I suspect victims they win in the long run.
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
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
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
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
For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.
Elizabeth Bowen
Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
Elizabeth Bowen
Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope it is impossible.
Elizabeth Bowen
Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.
Elizabeth Bowen
in my experience one thing you don't learn from is anything anyone set up to be a lesson what you are to know you pick up as you go along.
Elizabeth Bowen
Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
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
memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.
Elizabeth Bowen