Elizabeth Bowen Quotes - Page 5

Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.

Sins cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life.

... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.

Imagination of my kind is most caught, most fired, most worked upon by the unfamiliar: I have thrivenon the changes and chances, the dislocations andcontrasts which have made up so much of my life.

For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.

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?

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.

Style is the thing that's always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style.

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.

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

When I read a story, I relive the moment from which it sprang. A scene burned itself into me, a building magnetized me, a mood orseason of Nature's penetrated me, history suddenly appeared to me in some tiny act, or a face had begun to haunt me before I glanced at it.

One can suffer a convulsion of one's entire nature, and, unless it makes some noise, no one notices. It's not just that we are incurious; we completely lack any sense of each other's existences.

very young people are true but not resounding instruments.

Revenge was a very wild kind of justice.

nobody ever dies of an indignity.

After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.

Sacrificers are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those they sacrifice.

We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.

Convention was our safeguard: could one have stronger?

Writers do not find subjects; subjects find them.

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.

We have really no absent friends.

Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.

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

Bring all your intelligence to bear on your beginning.