I became, and remain, my characters’ close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.
About Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen CBEwas an Irish-British novelist and short story writer notable for her books about the “big house” of Irish landed Protestants as well as her fiction about life in wartime London.
In 1958, she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by Russian-American linguist Roman Jakobson.
More quotes from Elizabeth Bowen
Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
I became, and remain, my characters’ close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
Experience isn’t interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
Education is not so important as people think.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
We are minor in everything but our passions.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
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.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
That is partly why women marry – to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
I think the main thing, don’t you, is to keep the show on the road.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one’s outlook; it only confirms one’s idea that one is unique.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet – when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist
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.
Anglo-Irish novelist and diarist