Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen, CBEwas an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 June 1899
CountryIreland
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.
somewhere-else now-and-then should
What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.
self stimulus chosen
The most steady, the most self-sufficient nature depends, more than it knows, on its few chosen stimuli.
short-life cutting class
Sins cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life.
silence different sound
Silences can be as different as sounds.
stories action ends
Story involves action. Action towards an end not to be foreseen (by the reader) but also towards an end which, having been reached, must be seen to have been from the start inevitable.
suffering survival desert
We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.
people privacy
Love of privacy - perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society - has become in many people almost pathological.
bullying travel sight
Nothing, that is say no one, can be such an inexorable tour-conductor as one's own conscience or sense of duty, if one allows either the upper hand: the self-bullying that goes on in the name of sight-seeing is grievous.