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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
Everything
Crowded
Never
Dislike
World
Town
People
Towns
London
Quiet
Streets
War
Dislikes
More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen
My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without - a so-called normal relation to society. My books are my relation to society.
Elizabeth Bowen
Childish fantasy, like the sheath over the bud, not only protects but curbs the terrible budding spirit, protects not only innocence from the world, but the world from the power of innocence.
Elizabeth Bowen
Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.
Elizabeth Bowen
Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?
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
To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.
Elizabeth Bowen
Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
Elizabeth Bowen
One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
Elizabeth Bowen
...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
nothing is more restful than conformity.
Elizabeth Bowen
Young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate they like to have loud chords struck on them.
Elizabeth Bowen
Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope it is impossible.
Elizabeth Bowen
We desert those who desert us we cannot afford to suffer we must live how we can.
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
If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
Elizabeth Bowen
No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.
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
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
I am fully intelligent only when I write. I have a certain amount of small-change intelligence, which I carry round with me as, at any rate in a town, one has to carry small money, for the needs of the day, the non-writing day. But it seems to me I seldom purely think ... if I thought more I might write less.
Elizabeth Bowen
Roughly, the action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown. In the first half of a novel, the unpredictability should be the more striking. In the second half, the inevitability should be the more striking.
Elizabeth Bowen
