Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen, CBEwas an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 June 1899
CountryIreland
artist ornaments unthinkable
... artists were intended to be an ornament to society. As a society in themselves they are unthinkable.
change imagination chance
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.
freedom flying gold
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.
morning fall autumn
Autumn arrives in the early morning.
order people crooks
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.
clever stupid party
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.
travel wall real
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.
italian looks graves
I do like Italian graves; they look so much more lived in.
language currency shops
Don't you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same ...
knowing purpose may
Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.
hot rudeness manners
rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate - it slid and melted away.
character meetings
Meetings that do not come off keep a character of their own. They stay as they were projected.
memories unique identity
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.
memories powerful half
I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experiences, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true.