Elizabeth Bowen
Good-byes breed a sort of distaste for whomever you say good-bye to; this hurts, you feel, this must not happen again.Collection: Inspirational
Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Real
Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.Collection: Want
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.Collection: Real
Don't you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same.Collection: Language
The most steady, the most self-sufficient nature depends, more than it knows, on its few chosen stimuli.Collection: Self
Meetings that do not come off keep a character of their own. They stay as they were projected.Collection: Character
People in love, in whom every sense is open, cannot beat off the influence of a place.Collection: People
Art is for [the Irish] inseparable from artifice: of that, the theatre is the home. Possibly, it was England made me a novelist.Collection: Art
The passion of vanity has its own depths in the spirit, and is powerfully militant.Collection: Passion
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.Collection: Relationship
[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.Collection: Fiction
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.Collection: Reading
... into the novel goes such taste as I have for rational behaviour and social portraiture. The short story, as I see it to be, allows for what is crazy about humanity: obstinacies, inordinate heroisms, "immortal longings.Collection: Crazy
A Bowen, in the first place, made Bowen’s Court. Since then, with a rather alarming sureness, Bowen’s Court has made all the succeeding Bowens.Collection: Firsts
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: Stories