Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen, CBEwas an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 June 1899
CountryIreland
character half firsts
Roughly, the action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown. In the first half of a novel, the unpredictability should be the more striking. In the second half, the inevitability should be the more striking.
writing style phony
Style is the thing that's always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style.
art crafts novel
Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft ...
void speak dread
... love dreads being isolated, being left to speak in a void -- at the beginning it would often rather listen than speak.
lying light doe
Every love has a poetic relevance of its own; each love brings to light only what to it is relevant. Outside lies the junk-yard of what does not matter.
romantic-love desire paradox
The paradox of romantic love -- that what one possesses, one can no longer desire -- was at work.
writing looks littles
... it appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy, little is quite impossible.
writing eye adults
The writer, unlike his non-writing adult friend, has no predisposed outlook; he seldom observes deliberately. He sees what he didnot intend to see; he remembers what does not seem wholly possible. Inattentive learner in the schoolroom of life, he keeps some faculty free to veer and wander. His is the roving eye.
fiction stories knows
[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.
baby peace war
Almost everybody wore a curious limpidity of expression, like newborn babies or souls just after death. Dazed but curiously dignified.... after a criseof hysterical revulsion and tiredness, I passed beyondand became entered by a rather sublime feeling.
house nerves looks
Ghosts, we hope, may be always with us--that is, never too far out of the reach of fancy. On the whole, it would seem they adapt themselves well, perhaps better than we do, to changing world conditions--they enlarge their domain, shift their hold on our nerves, and, dispossessed of one habitat, set up house in another. The universal battiness of our century looks like providing them with a propitious climate ...
war mistake tables-and-chairs
All my life I have said, "Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs"--and what a mistake.
people care pity
I pity people who do not care for Society. They are poorer for the oblation they do not make.
opera lasts hunger
Almost everyone admits to hunger during the Opera.... Hunger is so exalting that during a last act you practically levitate.