Quote

Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.

Elizabeth Bowen

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Elizabeth Bowen
Age: 73 †
Born: 1899
Born: June 7
Died: 1973
Died: February 22
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Dublin city
Elisabeth Bowen
People
Towns
London
Quiet
Streets
War
Dislikes
Everything
Crowded
Never
Dislike
World
Town

More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

Image
Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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
Image
fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
... it appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy, little is quite impossible.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope it is impossible.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Memory must be patchy what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out - unique to oneself, one's own, one's claim to identity, it implicates one's identity in its fibbing.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
The paradox of romantic love -- that what one possesses, one can no longer desire -- was at work.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Sins cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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
Image
When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
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
Image
...the power-loving temperament is more dangerous when it either prefers or is forced to operate in what is materially a void. Wehave everything to dread from the dispossessed.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Characters should on the whole, be under rather than over articulate. What they intend to say should be more evident, more striking (because of its greater inner importance to the plot) than what they arrive at saying.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.
Elizabeth Bowen
Image
Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
Elizabeth Bowen