Elizabeth bowen quotes

We have really no absent friends.

If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.

Bring all your intelligence to bear on your beginning.

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

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved is part of one's self-respect.

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.

Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable.

I do like Italian graves; they look so much more lived in.

Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.

Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.

Spoilt pleasure is a sad, unseemly thing; you can only bury it.

Mr. [Aldous] Huxley has been the alarming young man for a long time, a sort of perpetual clever nephew who can be relied on to flutter the lunch party. Whatever will he say next? How does he think of those things? He has been deplored once or twice, but feeling is in his favor: he is steadily read. He is at once the truly clever person and the stupid person's idea of the clever person; he is expected to be relentless, to administer intellectual shocks.

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

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.

Disappointment tears the bearable film off life.

Writers do not find subjects; subjects find them.

nothing is more restful than conformity.

We are minor in everything but our passions.

To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.

Two things are terrible in childhood: helplessness (being in other people's power) and apprehension - the apprehension that something is being concealed from us because it is too bad to be told.

Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland.

Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.

Dialogue should convey a sense of spontaneity but eliminate the repetitiveness of real talk.

Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.

...there must be something she wanted; and that therefore she was no lady.

The short story is at an advantage over the novel, and can claim its nearer kinship to poetry, because it must be more concentrated, can be more visionary, and is not weighed down (as the novel is bound to be) by facts, explanation, or analysis. I do not mean to say that the short story is by any means exempt from the laws of narrative: it must observe them, but on its own terms.

one should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.

What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.

Style is the thing that's always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style.

Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.

All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.

the process of reading is reciprocal; the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.

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.

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.

Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

A romantic man often feels more uplifted with two women than with one: his love seems to hit the ideal mark somewhere between two different faces.

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.

Silences can be as different as sounds.

The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.

nobody ever dies of an indignity.

Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.

But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it?

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.

very young people are true but not resounding instruments.

... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.

Dialogue is the ideal means of showing what is between the characters. It crystallizes relationships. It should, ideally, be so effective as to make analysis or explanation of the relationships between the characters unnecessary.

The writer, unlike his non-writing adult friend, has no predisposed outlook; he seldom observes deliberately. He sees what he didnot intend to see; he remembers what does not seem wholly possible. Inattentive learner in the schoolroom of life, he keeps some faculty free to veer and wander. His is the roving eye.

If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.

I am dead against art's being self-expression. I see an inherent failure in any story which fails to detach itself from the author-detach itself in the sense that a well-blown soap-bubble detaches itself from the bowl of the blower's pipe and spherically takes off into the air as a new, whole, pure, iridescent world. Whereas the ill-blown bubble, as children know, timidly adheres to the bowl's lip, then either bursts or sinks flatly back again.

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.

After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.

memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.

...though one can be callous in Ireland one cannot be wholly opaque or material. An unearthly disturbance works in the spirit; reason can never reconcile one to life; nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.

But to be quite oneself one must first waste a little time.

To the sun Rome owes its underlying glow, and its air called golden - to me, more the yellow of white wine; like wine it raises agreeability to poetry.

Revenge was a very wild kind of justice.

Love of privacy - perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society - has become in many people almost pathological.

Sins cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life.

It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.

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.

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.

As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.

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.

Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.

Every love has a poetic relevance of its own; each love brings to light only what to it is relevant. Outside lies the junk-yard of what does not matter.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

I suspect victims; they win in the long run.

Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.

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.

to leap is not only to leap, it is to hit the ground somewhere.

Sacrificers are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those they sacrifice.

Knowledge of Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain through the thinning shoe-leather. ... When it comes to knowing, the senses are more honest than the intelligence. Nothing is more real than the first wall you lean up against sobbing with exhaustion. Rome no more than beheld (that is, taken in through the eyes only) could still be a masterpiece in cardboard - the eye I suppose being of all the organs the most easily infatuated and then jaded and so tricked. Seeing is pleasure, but not knowledge.

Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.

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

The paradox of romantic love -- that what one possesses, one can no longer desire -- was at work.

Each piece of dialogue MUST be "something happening". . .The "amusing" for its OWN sake should above all be censored. . .The functional use of dialogue for the plot must be the first thing in the writer's mind. Where functional usefulness cannot be established, dialogue must be left out.

somehow at parties at which one stays standing up one seems to require to be more concentratedly intelligent than one does at those at which one can sit down.

History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts; it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called 'eternal.' What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.

It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.

Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.

She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her.

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.

Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.

Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.

For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.

The craft of the novelist does lie first of all in story-telling.

Silence sat in the taxi, as though a stranger had got in.

What is being said is the effect of something that has happened; at the same time, what is being said is in itself something happening, which will, in turn, leave its effect.

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.

In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.

When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.

every short story is an experiment - what one must ask is not only, did it come off, but was it, as an experiment, worth making?

The novelist's--any writer's--object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen.

Forgiveness should be an act, but this is a state with him.

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.

Convention was our safeguard: could one have stronger?

The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaited him--a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured--captured by some experience to which one may have given hardly a thought.

Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.

Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.

Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?

The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.

I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.

Who is ever adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't.

[A writer] should try not to be too far, personally, below the level of his work.

But complex people are never certain that they are not crooks, never certain their passports are quite in order, and are, therefore, unnerved by the slightest thing.

Though not all reading children grow up to be writers, I take it that most creative writers must in their day have been reading children.

Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man.

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.

Dress has never been at all a straightforward business: so much subterranean interest and complex feeling attaches to it. As a topic ... it has a flowery head but deep roots in the passion. On the subject of dress almost no one, for one or another reason, feels truly indifferent: if their own clothes do not concern them, somebody else's do. ... Ten minutes talk about clothes (except between perfect friends) tends to make everyone present either overbearing, guarded or touchy.

Certain books come to meet me, as do people.

When I read a story, I relive the moment from which it sprang. A scene burned itself into me, a building magnetized me, a mood orseason of Nature's penetrated me, history suddenly appeared to me in some tiny act, or a face had begun to haunt me before I glanced at it.

The silence of a shut park does not sound like country silence: it is tense and confined.

The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.

When one is a child, the disposition of objects, tables and chairs and doors, seems part of the natural order: a house-move lets in chaos - as it does for a dog.

One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.

life is a succession of readjustments.

we can surmount the anger we feel. To find oneself like a young tree inside a tomb is to discover the power to crack the tomb and grow up to any height.

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold.