without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
“First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
“Looking back at a repetition of empty days, one sees that monuments have sprung up. Habit is not mere subjugation, it is… — 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
All my life I have said, "Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs"--and what a mistake. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
“If they should only be ill,' she said, 'there would be so many little things we could do for them. It does… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
“You could see that her tremendous inside life, its solitary fears and fires, was out of accord with her humble view of… — 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
Imagination of my kind is most caught, most fired, most worked upon by the unfamiliar: I have thrivenon the changes and chances,… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
“She was in that flagging mood when to go on living seems only to load more unmeaning moments on to your memory.” — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
“Rich women live at such a distance from life that very often they never see their money — the Queen, they say,… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
[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
... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
Sins cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life. — 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 Image
“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 Image
It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
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 Image
without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
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 Image
“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 Image