Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen, CBEwas an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 June 1899
CountryIreland
writing people should
Dialogue should show the relationships among people.
trying levels should
[A writer] should try not to be too far, personally, below the level of his work.
character plot should
Characters should on the whole, be under rather than over articulate. What they intend to say should be more evident, more striking (because of its greater inner importance to the plot) than what they arrive at saying.
forgiveness states should
Forgiveness should be an act, but this is a state with him.
somewhere-else now-and-then should
What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.
trouble should difficulty
one should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.
disaster fact incorrect people tv
It could've been a disaster for people who couldn't see it on TV, so to speak. The fact that it was incorrect on TV alarmed me.
truth
Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.
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
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
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.