[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experiences, and that the most powerful of my memories are only… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
in my experience one thing you don't learn from is anything anyone set up to be a lesson; what you are to… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
The most steady, the most self-sufficient nature depends, more than it knows, on its few chosen stimuli. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
Sacrificers ... are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those that they sacrifice. Oh, the sacrificers, they get… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
The novelist's--any writer's--object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
I am dead against art's being self-expression. I see an inherent failure in any story which fails to detach itself from the… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
“Are you really an orphan? Yes, I am, said Portia a shade shortly. Are you? No, not at present, but I suppose it's a… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
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… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
One's sentiments -- call them that -- one's fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: only when they are betrayed or,… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
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… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
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. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
“First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences,… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
“But Miss Pym gave an impression, somehow, of having been attacked from within .” — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate - it slid and melted away. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
![“[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.” quote by Elizabeth Bowen](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/7a0/elizabeth-bowen-1197_fiction_my-early-stories-are-the-work-of-a-livin_2403622.png)
