Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen, CBEwas an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 June 1899
CountryIreland
live-in-the-moment stories tiny
When I read a story, I relive the moment from which it sprang. A scene burned itself into me, a building magnetized me, a mood orseason of Nature's penetrated me, history suddenly appeared to me in some tiny act, or a face had begun to haunt me before I glanced at it.
stories short-story experiments
every short story is an experiment - what one must ask is not only, did it come off, but was it, as an experiment, worth making?
fiction stories knows
[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.
stories action ends
Story involves action. Action towards an end not to be foreseen (by the reader) but also towards an end which, having been reached, must be seen to have been from the start inevitable.
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.
writing ideas surface
If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.
passion may habit
Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.