Elizabeth Bowen Quotes
Though not all reading children grow up to be writers, I take it that most creative writers must in their day have been reading children.
There's something so showy about desperation, it takes hard wits to see it's a grandiose form of funk.
Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie; when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.
If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.
Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.
Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.
The paradox of romantic love -- that what one possesses, one can no longer desire -- was at work.
But in general, for the purposes of most novelists, the number of objects genuinely necessary for. . .describing a scene will be found to be very small.
After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.
Sacrificers ... are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those that they sacrifice. Oh, the sacrificers, they get it both ways. A person knows themselves that they're able to do without.
writers do not find subjects: subjects find them. There is not so much a search as a state of open susceptibility.
Wariness had driven away poetry; from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could.
I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experiences, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true.
When one is a child, the disposition of objects, tables and chairs and doors, seems part of the natural order: a house-move lets in chaos - as it does for a dog.
Two things are terrible in childhood: helplessness (being in other people's power) and apprehension - the apprehension that something is being concealed from us because it is too bad to be told.
A Bowen, in the first place, made Bowen's Court. Since then, with a rather alarming sureness, Bowen's Court has made all the succeeding Bowens.
One can suffer a convulsion of one's entire nature, and, unless it makes some noise, no one notices. It's not just that we are incurious; we completely lack any sense of each other's existences.
To the sun Rome owes its underlying glow, and its air called golden - to me, more the yellow of white wine; like wine it raises agreeability to poetry.
... 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.
It is in this unearthly first hour of spring twilight that earth's almost agonized livingness is most felt. This hour is so dreadful to some people that they hurry indoors and turn on the lights.
In big houses in which things are done properly, there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.
Expectations are the most perilous form of dream, and when dreams do realise themselves it is in the waking world: the difference is subtly but often painfully felt.
Have not all poetic truths been already stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be final.
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.
