Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen, CBEwas an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 June 1899
CountryIreland
long-distance-relationship heart thinking
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
running loneliness long
Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.
running winning long
I suspect victims; they win in the long run.
giant hear impossible inside lunatic sort utter
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 intercourse from utter banality
art stopped
Art is the only thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
beginning ending loss small talk women
Intimacies between women go backwards, beginning with revelations and ending up in small talk without loss of esteem.
begins experience hardly itself repeat till until
Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself - in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience
truth
Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.
character directors literature
I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.
character crafts fiction
Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.
life conceited narcissism
Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
country literature married
Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
taken greatness want
All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
war brain literature
Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.