Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen, CBEwas an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 June 1899
CountryIreland
home emotions-feelings sentiments
It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.
country silence doe
The silence of a shut park does not sound like the country silence; it is tense and confined.
courage proust objects
Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?
spring twilight people
It is in this unearthly first hour of spring twilight that earth's almost agonized livingness is most felt. This hour is so dreadful to some people that they hurry indoors and turn on the lights.
attitude first-love swings
First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences, gestures, attitudes, a burning phrase with no context.
lonely pain loneliness
Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.
ties remember tradition
Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie; when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.
bud world spirit
Childish fantasy, like the sheath over the bud, not only protects but curbs the terrible budding spirit, protects not only innocence from the world, but the world from the power of innocence.
truth honesty speak
Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.
hope expectations desperation
There's something so showy about desperation, it takes hard wits to see it's a grandiose form of funk.
depression giants impossible
Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant; impossible socially, but full scale; and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.
writing dialogue deals
All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.
passion vanity depth
The passion of vanity has its own depths in the spirit, and is powerfully militant.
writing thoughtful thinking
Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.