Elizabeth Bowen Quotes
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Often when I write I am trying to make words do the work of line and color. I have the painter's sensitivity to light. Much of my writing is verbal painting.
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This, my first [bicycle] had an intrinsic beauty. And it opened for me an era of all but flying, which roads emptily crossing theairy, gold-gorsy Common enhanced. Nothing since has equalled that birdlike freedom.
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Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft.
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Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.
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Style is the thing that's always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style.
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Certain books come to meet me, as do people.
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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.
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Silence sat in the taxi, as though a stranger had got in.
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Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.
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Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.
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...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.
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All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
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Who is ever adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't.
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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.
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All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.
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life is a succession of readjustments.
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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?
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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.
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Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.
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[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.
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Childish fantasy, like the sheath over the bud, not only protects but curbs the terrible budding spirit, protects not only innocence from the world, but the world from the power of innocence.
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Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
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... 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.
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Princess Bibesco delighted in a semi-ideal world - a world which, though having a counterpart in her experience, was to a great extent brought into being by her own temperament and, one might say, flair.
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I do like Italian graves; they look so much more lived in.
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In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.
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Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
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... 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.
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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 banter from utter banality.
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Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.
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