Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

Memory must be patchy; what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out - unique to oneself, one's own, one's claim to identity, it implicates one's identity in its fibbing.

Every love has a poetic relevance of its own; each love brings to light only what to it is relevant. Outside lies the junk-yard of what does not matter.

I am fully intelligent only when I write. I have a certain amount of small-change intelligence, which I carry round with me as, at any rate in a town, one has to carry small money, for the needs of the day, the non-writing day. But it seems to me I seldom purely think ... if I thought more I might write less.

The passion of vanity has its own depths in the spirit, and is powerfully militant.

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.

If he could have been reembodied, at that moment a black wind would have rushed through the Villa Fioretta, wrenching the shutters off and tearing the pictures down, or an earthquake cracked the floors, or the olivey hill above the villa erupted, showering hot choking ash.

Also, perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all.

Everything in her life, she could see now, had taken the same turn - as for love, she often puzzled and puzzled, without ever allowing herself to be fully sad, as to what could be wrong with the formula. It does not work, she thought. At times there were moments when she asked herself if she could have been in the wrong: she would almost rather think that. What she thought she regretted was her lack of guard, her wayward extravagance - but had she all the time been more guarded than she imagined, had she been deceitful, had she been seen through? For what had always happened she could still not account. There seemed to be some way she did not know of by which people managed to understand each other.

Nobody ever dies of an indignity.

In general, the Anglo-Irish do not make good dancers; they are too spritely and conscious; they are incapable of one kind of trance or of being seemingly impersonal. And, for the formal, pure dance they lack the formality: about their stylishness (for they have stylishness) there is something impromptu, slightly disorderly.

The power-loving temperament is more dangerous when it either prefers or is forced to operate in what is materially a void. Wehave everything to dread from the dispossessed.

Certain books come to meet me, as do people.

Artists were intended to be an ornament to society. As a society in themselves they are unthinkable.

She was young-looking--most because of the impression she gave of still being on happy sensuous terms with life.

Each piece of dialogue MUST be "something happening" ... The "amusing" for its OWN sake should above all be censored ... The functional use of dialogue for the plot must be the first thing in the writer's mind. Where functional usefulness cannot be established, dialogue must be left out.

Disappointment tears the bearable film of life.

He feels spikes everywhere and rushes to impale himself.

Everything ungirt, artless, ardent, urgent about Louie was to the fore: all over herself she gave the impression of twisted stockings.

I do like Italian graves; they look so much more lived in.

Dialogue should convey a sense of spontaneity but eliminate the repetitiveness of real talk.

The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child.

Revenge was a very wild kind of justice ...

Raids are slightly constipating.

In this state, drugged by the rainy dusk, she almost always returned with sensual closeness to seaside childhood; once more she felt her heels in the pudding-softness of the hot tarred esplanade or her bare arm up to the elbow in rain-wet tamarisk. She smelt the shingle and heard it being sucked by the sea.

But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it?

The Irish landowner, partly from laziness but also from an indifferent delicacy, does not interfere in the lives of the people round. Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland, but these cannot operate the whole time: on the whole, the landowner leaves his tenants and work-people to make their own mistakes, while he makes his.

She posed as being more indolent than she felt, for fear of finding herself less able than she could wish.

I pity people who do not care for Society. They are poorer for the oblation they do not make.

All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.

Spezia offered Leopold almost nothing: his precocity devoured itself there, rejecting the steep sunny coast and nibbling blue edge of the sea that had drowned Shelley. His spirit became crustacean under douches of culture and mild philosophic chat from his Uncle Dee, who was cultured rather than erudite.

Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.

Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.

There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.

They had met one another, at first not very often, throughout the heady autumn of the first London air raids. Never had a season been more felt; one bought the poetic sense of it with the sense of death. Out of mists of morning charred by the smoke from ruins each day rose to a height of unmisty glitter; between the last of sunset and first note of the siren the darkening glassy tenseness of evening was drawn fine. From the moment of waking you tasted the sweet autumn not less because of an acridity on the tongue and nostrils; and as the singed dust settled and smoke diluted you felt more and more called upon to observe daytime as a pure and curious holiday from fear. All through London the ropings-off of dangerous tracts of streets made islands of exalted if stricken silence, and people crowded against the ropes to admire the sunny emptiness on the other side. The diversion of traffic out of blocked main thoroughfares into byways, the unstopping phatasmagoric streaming of lorries, buses, vans, drays, taxis past modest windows and quiet doorways set up an overpowering sense of London's organic power – somewhere there was a source from which heavy motion boiled, surged and, not to be damned up, force itself into new channels.

Rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate - it slid and melted away.

The cautious steps of women when something has happened came downstairs, sending vibrations up the spine of the house. The women came down with a kind of congested rush, like lava flowing as fast as it can.

The beautiful agonising mirage of the university was inescapable from. This was a forever she had no part in. The eternity was more real to her for consisting of fiery particles of transience - bridges the punt slid under, raindrops spattering the Cam with vanishing circles, shivered reflections, echoes evaporating, shadows metamorphosizing, distances shifting, glorification coming and going on buildings at a whim of the sun, grass flashing through arches, gasps of primitive breath coming from stones, dusk ebbing from waxen woodwork when doors opened. Holy pillars flowed upward and fountained out, round them being a ceaseless confluence of fanatical colours burningly staining glass. Nothing was at an end, so nothing stood still. And of this living eternity, of its kind and one of its children, had been Henry, walking beside her.

Writers do not find subjects; subjects find them.

The furniture would have missed you?
Furniture's knowing all right. Not much gets past the things in a room, I daresay, and chairs and tables don't go to the grave so soon. Every time I take the soft cloth to that stuff in the drawingroom, I could say, 'Well, you know a bit more'.

Very young people are true but not resounding instruments.

Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone the pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude. She had never landed at Cork, so this hill and that hill beyond were as unexpected as pictures at which you say "Oh look!" Nobody was beside her to share the moment, which would have been imperfect with anyone else there.

First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences, gestures, attitudes, a burning phrase with no context.

Almost everybody wore a curious limpidity of expression, like newborn babies or souls just after death. Dazed but curiously dignified ... after a criseof hysterical revulsion and tiredness, I passed beyondand became entered by a rather sublime feeling.

It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home. The need to attach themselves makes wandering people strike roots in a day: wherever we unconsciously feel, we live.

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.

Some people are moulded by their aspirations, others by their hostilities.

Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.

The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved is part of one's self-respect.

The belt slid down her thin hips, and she nervously gripped at it, pulling it up. Short sleeves showed her very thin arms and big delicate elbow joints. Her body was all concave and jerkily fluid lines; it moved with sensitive looseness, loosely threaded together: each movement had a touch of exaggeration , as though some secret power kept springing out.

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

We are minor in everything but our passions.

A smell of sandalwood boxes, a kind of glaze on the air from all the chintzes numbed his earthy vitality, he became all ribs and uniform.

She was a scrap of a widow, ever so plucky, just back from China, with damp little hands, a husky voice, and defective tear-ducts that gave her eyes always rather a swimmy look. She had a prostrated way of looking up at you, and that fluffy, bird's-nesty hair that hairpins get lost in.

Love is obtuse and reckless; it interferes.

Silence sat in the taxi, as though a stranger had got in.

We have really no absent friends.

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.

What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.

Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.

People in love, in whom every sense is open, cannot beat off the influence of a place.

Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.

The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.

Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.

People must hope so much when they tear streets up and fight at barricades. But, whoever wins, the streets are laid again and the trams start running again. One hopes too much of destroying things. If revolutions do not fail, they fail you.

Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.

Bring all your intelligence to bear on your beginning.

A novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.

The short story is at an advantage over the novel, and can claim its nearer kinship to poetry, because it must be more concentrated, can be more visionary, and is not weighed down (as the novel is bound to be) by facts, explanation, or analysis. I do not mean to say that the short story is by any means exempt from the laws of narrative: it must observe them, but on its own terms.

Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.

It is queer to be in a place when someone has gone. It is not two other places, the place that they were there in, and the place that was there before they came. I can't get used to this third place or to staying behind.

What do you want me to say?"

"I wish you would say something. Our life goes by without any comment.

The cracked white cups took pink lights as the sun, already descending, slanted across the cherry; the tree filled the air with its heavy scentlessness.

At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial games could be played.

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.

The inside of the house – with its shallow door-panels, lozenge door-knobs, polished brass ball on the end of the banisters, stuffy red matt paper with stripes to artfully shadowed as to appear bars – was more than simply novel to Henrietta, it was antagonistic, as though it had been invented to put her out. She felt the house was acting, nothing seemed to be natural; objects did not wait to be seen but came crowding in on her, each with what amounted to its aggressive cry.

Forgiveness should be an act, but this is a state with him.

Spoilt pleasure is a sad, unseemly thing; you can only bury it.

Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland ...

She thought she need not worry about her youth; it wasted itself spontaneously, like sunshine elsewhere or firelight in an empty room.

Plot might seem to be a matter of choice. It is not. The particular plot is something the novelist is driven to: it is what is left after the whittling-away of alternatives.' Elizabeth Bowen opened her Notes on Writing a Novel (1945, reprinted in Collected Impressions, Longmans, Green & Co.,

What's the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually - our sense of personality is a sense of outrage ...

Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.

If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.

Whenever possible I avoid talking. Reprieve from talking is my idea of a holiday. At risk of seeming unsociable, which I am, I admit I love to be left in a beatific trance, when I am in one. Friendly Romans recognize that wish.

Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.

Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man.

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.

To leap is not only to leap, it is to hit the ground somewhere.

To foresee pleasures makes anybody a poet ... to seek pleasure makes a hero of anyone: you open yourself so entirely to fate.

But complex people are never certain that they are not crooks, never certain their passports are quite in order, and are, therefore, unnerved by the slightest thing.

Darling, I don't want you; I've got no place for you; I only want what you give. I don't want the whole of anyone ... What you want is the whole of me-isn't it, isn't it?-and the whole of me isn't there for anybody. In that full sense you want me I don't exist.

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.

But what a horrible world 'society' is.

You know, even grown-up people cannot do what they want most"
"Then why grow up?

There must be perfect towns where shadows were strong like buildings, towns secret without coldness, unaware without indifference.

Makes of men date, like makes of cars...

All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.

Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.

History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts; it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called 'eternal.' What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.