36 Quotes by Catherine Drinker Bowen

I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little more, as I grown older.

In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn’t be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.

Chamber music – a conversation between friends.

All the others arts are lonely. We paint alone – my picture, my interpretation of the sky. My poem, my novel. But in music – ensemble music, not soloism – we share. No altruism this, for we receive tenfold what we give.

It is a great, a pleasant thing to have a friend with whom to walk, untroubled, through the woods, by the stream, saying nothing, at peace – the heart all clean and quiet and empty, ready for the spirit that may choose to be its guest.

A woman’s biography – with about eight famous historical exceptions – so often turns out to be the story of a man and the woman who helped his career.

People who carry a musical soul about them are, I think, more receptive than others. They smile more readily. One feels in them a pleasant propensity toward the lesser sins, a pleasing readiness also to admit the possibility that on occasion they may be in the wrong – they may be mistaken.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Will the reader turn the page?