Elizabeth Bowen Quotes - Page 2

The silence of a shut park does not sound like country silence: it is tense and confined.

My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without - a so-called normal relation to society. My books are my relation to society.

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

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.

we can surmount the anger we feel. To find oneself like a young tree inside a tomb is to discover the power to crack the tomb and grow up to any height.

Certain books come to meet me, as do people.

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

Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable.

Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.

The craft of the novelist does lie first of all in story-telling.

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

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.

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.

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

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

nothing is more restful than conformity.

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.

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.

Dialogue is the ideal means of showing what is between the characters. It crystallizes relationships. It should, ideally, be so effective as to make analysis or explanation of the relationships between the characters unnecessary.

Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.

One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.

What is being said is the effect of something that has happened; at the same time, what is being said is in itself something happening, which will, in turn, leave its effect.

Roughly, the action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown. In the first half of a novel, the unpredictability should be the more striking. In the second half, the inevitability should be the more striking.