Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen, CBEwas an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 June 1899
CountryIreland
solitude looks elbows
Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone the pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude. She had never landed at Cork, so this hill and that hill beyond were as unexpected as pictures at which you say "Oh look!" Nobody was beside her to share the moment, which would have been imperfect with anyone else there.
house nerves looks
Ghosts, we hope, may be always with us--that is, never too far out of the reach of fancy. On the whole, it would seem they adapt themselves well, perhaps better than we do, to changing world conditions--they enlarge their domain, shift their hold on our nerves, and, dispossessed of one habitat, set up house in another. The universal battiness of our century looks like providing them with a propitious climate ...
italian looks graves
I do like Italian graves; they look so much more lived in.
eye looks faces
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.
country literature married
Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
taken greatness want
All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
passion may habit
Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.
silence speak climax
Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
art children air
I am dead against art's being self-expression. I see an inherent failure in any story which fails to detach itself from the author-detach itself in the sense that a well-blown soap-bubble detaches itself from the bowl of the blower's pipe and spherically takes off into the air as a new, whole, pure, iridescent world. Whereas the ill-blown bubble, as children know, timidly adheres to the bowl's lip, then either bursts or sinks flatly back again.
absence absent-friends absent
We have really no absent friends.
girl luxury knowing
Young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate; they like to have loud chords struck on them.
Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?
people expectations realization
For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.
disappointment tears film
Disappointment tears the bearable film of life.