Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen, CBEwas an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 June 1899
CountryIreland
truth
Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.
travel wall real
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.
clothes battle wish
Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.
men choices luck
Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man.
people youth instruments
very young people are true but not resounding instruments.
dog children moving
When one is a child, the disposition of objects, tables and chairs and doors, seems part of the natural order: a house-move lets in chaos - as it does for a dog.
regret children anticipate
children like change - for one thing, they never anticipate regret.
children people suffering
Also, perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all.
two people childhood
Two things are terrible in childhood: helplessness (being in other people's power) and apprehension - the apprehension that something is being concealed from us because it is too bad to be told.
change life-is succession
life is a succession of readjustments.
book blow wind
without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold.
air important guarantees
After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.