357 Quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

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.

The short story is at an advantage over the novel, and can claim its nearer kinship to poetry, because it must be more concentrated, can be more visionary, and is not weighed down (as the novel is bound to be) by facts, explanation, or analysis. I do not mean to say that the short story is by any means exempt from the laws of narrative: it must observe them, but on its own terms.

The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaited him--a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured--captured by some experience to which one may have given hardly a thought.

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.

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.

At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial games could be played.

Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland ...

... artists were intended to be an ornament to society. As a society in themselves they are unthinkable.

Dogs are a habit, I think.