357 Quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

Style is the thing that’s always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style.

I think the main thing, don’t you, is to keep the show on the road.

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart.

All my life I have said, “Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs” – and what a mistake.

Often when I write I am trying to make words do the work of line and color. I have the painter’s sensitivity to light. Much of my writing is verbal painting.

To the sun Rome owes its underlying glow, and its air called golden – to me, more the yellow of white wine; like wine it raises agreeability to poetry.

Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One’s relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.

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.

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.