Elizabeth Bowen Quotes - Page 6

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland.

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.

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.

History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts; it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called 'eternal.' What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

Disappointment tears the bearable film off life.

There's something so showy about desperation, it takes hard wits to see it's a grandiose form of funk.

Good-byes breed a sort of distaste for whomever you say good-bye to; this hurts, you feel, this must not happen again.

She had one of those charming faces which, according to the angle from which you see them, look either melancholy or impertinent. Her eyes were grey; her trick of narrowing them made her seem to reflect, the greater part of the time, in the dusk of her second thoughts. With that mood, that touch of arriere pensee, went an uncertain, speaking set of lips.

Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.

The most steady, the most self-sufficient nature depends, more than it knows, on its few chosen stimuli.

No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life--the first twenty years of it--had about them something semi-fictitious.

Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.

Don't you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same.

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.

People in love, in whom every sense is open, cannot beat off the influence of a place.

Meetings that do not come off keep a character of their own. They stay as they were projected.

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.

Story involves action. Action towards an end not to be foreseen (by the reader) but also towards an end which, having been reached, must be seen to have been from the start inevitable.

With three or more people there is something bold in the air: direct things get said which would frighten two people alone and conscious of each inch of their nearness to one another. To be three is to be in public - you feel safe.

Raids are slightly constipating.

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

A novel which survives, which withstands and outlives time, does do something more than merely survive. It does not stand still. It accumulates round itself the understanding of all these persons who bring to it something of their own. It acquires associations, it becomes a form of experience in itself, so that two people who meet can often make friends, find an approach to each other, because of this one great common experience they have had.

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