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Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.
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
Never
Dislike
World
Town
People
Towns
London
Quiet
Streets
War
Dislikes
Everything
Crowded
More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen
Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little-even if one did once know what one meant
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
Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.
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
memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.
Elizabeth Bowen
When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.
Elizabeth Bowen
One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
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
After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.
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
Revenge was a very wild kind of justice.
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
Plot is the knowing of destination.
Elizabeth Bowen
Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
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
... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.
Elizabeth Bowen
Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.
Elizabeth Bowen
Certain books come to meet me, as do people.
Elizabeth Bowen
