Top Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

Elizabeth Bowen Biography

Elizabeth Bowen, CBE (/ˈboʊən/; 7 June 1899 – 22 February 1973) was an Irish novelist and short story writer, notable for some of the best fiction about life in wartime London.

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Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

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.

Passion, Roots, Clothes, Tends, Attaches, Concern

Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market - you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane; another won't get over the right stile.

Boy, Boys, Lane, Making, Pigs, Writing

Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer's take-down of a 'real life' conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.

Illusion, Life, Real, Would Be, Writing

Dogs are a habit, I think.

Dog, Dogs, Funny, Habit, Think, Thinking

the process of reading is reciprocal; the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.

Book, Furnished, Mind, Reading

. . . there must be something she wanted; and that therefore she was no lady.

Lady, Wanted

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.

Mean, Outgrown, Reader, Reality, Though, Truth

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.

Learnt, Lonely, Love, Open, Pain, Touching

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.

Country, Individually, Matter, Personality

Makes of men date, like makes of car.

Car, Date, Like, Men

the slight sense of degeneracy induced by reading novels before luncheon

Luncheon, Novel, Reading, Reading Novels, Sense, Slight

With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

Alone, Children, Taken, Talking, Violations

Disappointment tears the bearable film of life.

Disappointment, Film, Life, Tears

. . . 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.

Inherent, Littles, Looks, Quite, Though, Writing

one should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.

Difficulties, Difficulty, Discuss, Should, Trouble

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

Country, Die, Ireland, Literature, Married

Art is for [the Irish] inseparable from artifice: of that, the theatre is the home. Possibly, it was England made me a novelist.

Art, England, Home, Irish, Theatre

Knowledge of Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain through the thinning shoe-leather. . . . When it comes to knowing, the senses are more honest than the intelligence. Nothing is more real than the first wall you lean up against sobbing with exhaustion. Rome no more than beheld (that is, taken in through the eyes only) could still be a masterpiece in cardboard - the eye I suppose being of all the organs the most easily infatuated and then jaded and so tricked. Seeing is pleasure, but not knowledge.

Lean, Real, Seeing, Travel, Wall

somehow at parties at which one stays standing up one seems to require to be more concentratedly intelligent than one does at those at which one can sit down.

Concentratedly, Doe, Intelligent, Party, Sit, Somehow

I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.

Keep, Literature, Road, Show, Shows, Thinking

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Elizabeth Bowen Biography

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