Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen, CBEwas an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 June 1899
CountryIreland
feelings moments driven
Wariness had driven away poetry; from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could.
forgiveness states should
Forgiveness should be an act, but this is a state with him.
learning growth lessons
in my experience one thing you don't learn from is anything anyone set up to be a lesson; what you are to know you pick up as you go along.
drama book night
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.
home firsts succeed
A Bowen, in the first place, made Bowen's Court. Since then, with a rather alarming sureness, Bowen's Court has made all the succeeding Bowens.
ideas roots dandelions
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.
suffering noise indifference
One can suffer a convulsion of one's entire nature, and, unless it makes some noise, no one notices. It's not just that we are incurious; we completely lack any sense of each other's existences.
sports mistake two
The Irish landowner, partly from laziness but also from an indifferent delicacy, does not interfere in the lives of the people round. Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland, but these cannot operate the whole time: on the whole, the landowner leaves his tenants and work-people to make their own mistakes, while he makes his.
party intelligent doe
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.
country personality matter
What's the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually - our sense of personality is a sense of outrage ...
essence finals poetic
Have not all poetic truths been already stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be final.
book reading mind
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.
revenge justice kind
Revenge was a very wild kind of justice ...
somewhere-else now-and-then should
What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.