Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen, CBEwas an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 June 1899
CountryIreland
pain silence doubt
There is no doubt that sorrow brings one down in the world. The aristocratic privilege of silence belongs, you soon find out, to only the happy state- or, at least, to the state when pain keeps within bounds.
religious house feelings
In big houses in which things are done properly, there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.
running time people
Grown-up people seem to be busy by clockwork... They run their unswerving course from object to object, directed by some mysterious inner needle that points all the time to what they must do next. You can only marvel at such misuse of time.
princess world might
Princess Bibesco delighted in a semi-ideal world - a world which, though having a counterpart in her experience, was to a great extent brought into being by her own temperament and, one might say, flair.
growing-up anger tree
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.
growing-up children book
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.
children book reading
The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child.
book blow wind
without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold.
change life-is succession
life is a succession of readjustments.
stronger conventions
Convention was our safeguard: could one have stronger?
ifs
But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it?
fiction hub
That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
lying two literature
The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.
respect self feelings
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.