Elizabeth Bowen
It is in this unearthly first hour of spring twilight that earth's almost agonized livingness is most felt. This hour is so dreadful to some people that they hurry indoors and turn on the lights.Collection: Spring
All my life I have said, "Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs"--and what a mistake.Collection: War
First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences, gestures, attitudes, a burning phrase with no context.Collection: Attitude
the slight sense of degeneracy induced by reading novels before luncheonCollection: Reading
Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable. If you and I were capable of being altogether house-trained and made jolly, we should be nicer people, but not writers.Collection: People
... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.Collection: Truth
... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.Collection: Writing
Nothing, that is say no one, can be such an inexorable tour-conductor as one's own conscience or sense of duty, if one allows either the upper hand: the self-bullying that goes on in the name of sight-seeing is grievous.Collection: Bullying
... in general, the Anglo-Irish do not make good dancers; they are too spritely and conscious; they are incapable of one kind of trance or of being seemingly impersonal. And, for the formal, pure dance they lack the formality: about their stylishness (for they have stylishness) there is something impromptu, slightly disorderly.Collection: Dance
... love dreads being isolated, being left to speak in a void -- at the beginning it would often rather listen than speak.Collection: Void
Princess Bibesco delighted in a semi-ideal world - a world which, though having a counterpart in her experience, was to a great extent brought into being by her own temperament and, one might say, flair.Collection: Princess
In big houses in which things are done properly, there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.Collection: Religious
On the subject of dress almost no one, for one or another reason, feels truly indifferent: if their own clothes do not concern them, somebody else's do.Collection: Clothes
Makes of men date, like makes of car.Collection: Men
rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate - it slid and melted away.Collection: Hot
Almost everyone admits to hunger during the Opera.... Hunger is so exalting that during a last act you practically levitate.Collection: Opera
As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.Collection: Passion
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.Collection: Change
Dress has never been at all a straightforward business: so much subterranean interest and complex feeling attaches to it. As a topic ... it has a flowery head but deep roots in the passion. On the subject of dress almost no one, for one or another reason, feels truly indifferent: if their own clothes do not concern them, somebody else's do. ... Ten minutes talk about clothes (except between perfect friends) tends to make everyone present either overbearing, guarded or touchy.Collection: Passion
Sins cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life.Collection: Short Life
...there must be something she wanted; and that therefore she was no lady.Collection: Wanted
No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.Collection: Fate
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.Collection: Mind
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?Collection: Stories
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.Collection: Live In The Moment
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.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Suffering
very young people are true but not resounding instruments.Collection: People
nobody ever dies of an indignity.Collection: Embarrassment
Revenge was a very wild kind of justice.Collection: Revenge
After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.Collection: Air
Sacrificers are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those they sacrifice.Collection: Sacrifice
We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.Collection: Survival
Writers do not find subjects; subjects find them.Collection: Subjects
Convention was our safeguard: could one have stronger?Collection: Stronger
Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland.Collection: Sports
Bring all your intelligence to bear on your beginning.Collection: Writing
We have really no absent friends.Collection: Absence
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.Collection: Drama
Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.Collection: Rome
But complex people are never certain that they are not crooks, never certain their passports are quite in order, and are, therefore, unnerved by the slightest thing.Collection: Order
It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.Collection: Home
Love of privacy - perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society - has become in many people almost pathological.Collection: People
Dogs are a habit, I think.Collection: Funny
But in general, for the purposes of most novelists, the number of objects genuinely necessary for. . .describing a scene will be found to be very small.Collection: Numbers
Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.Collection: Writing
...though one can be callous in Ireland one cannot be wholly opaque or material. An unearthly disturbance works in the spirit; reason can never reconcile one to life; nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.Collection: Opaque
Some ideas, like dandelions in lawns, strike tenaciously: you may pull off the top but the root remains, drives down suckers and may even sprout again.Collection: Ideas
But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it?Collection: Love