Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen, CBEwas an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 June 1899
CountryIreland
house nerves looks
Ghosts, we hope, may be always with us--that is, never too far out of the reach of fancy. On the whole, it would seem they adapt themselves well, perhaps better than we do, to changing world conditions--they enlarge their domain, shift their hold on our nerves, and, dispossessed of one habitat, set up house in another. The universal battiness of our century looks like providing them with a propitious climate ...
war mistake tables-and-chairs
All my life I have said, "Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs"--and what a mistake.
people care pity
I pity people who do not care for Society. They are poorer for the oblation they do not make.
opera lasts hunger
Almost everyone admits to hunger during the Opera.... Hunger is so exalting that during a last act you practically levitate.
Raids are slightly constipating.
running winning long
I suspect victims; they win in the long run.
numbers novelists purpose
But in general, for the purposes of most novelists, the number of objects genuinely necessary for. . .describing a scene will be found to be very small.
spring writing giving
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.
mind plot use
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.
war people world
Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.
power void dangerous
...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.
fiction autobiography bounds
... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.
crazy humanity behaviour
... into the novel goes such taste as I have for rational behaviour and social portraiture. The short story, as I see it to be, allows for what is crazy about humanity: obstinacies, inordinate heroisms, "immortal longings.
opaque want spirit
...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.