Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen, CBEwas an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 June 1899
CountryIreland
passion may habit
Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.
passion roots clothes
Dress has never been at all a straightforward business: so much subterranean interest and complex feeling attaches to it. As a topic ... it has a flowery head but deep roots in the passion. On the subject of dress almost no one, for one or another reason, feels truly indifferent: if their own clothes do not concern them, somebody else's do. ... Ten minutes talk about clothes (except between perfect friends) tends to make everyone present either overbearing, guarded or touchy.
passion vanity depth
The passion of vanity has its own depths in the spirit, and is powerfully militant.
character passion history
As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.
passion literature minors
We are minor in everything but our passions.
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.