WIST Quotations

Bowen, Elizabeth -- “Manners,” Collected Impressions (1950)

Dave — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 03:39:49 +0000

Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.

Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) Irish author
“Manners,” Collected Impressions (1950)
(Source)

Bowen, Elizabeth -- “Truth and Fiction,” BBC Radio (Oct 1956)

Dave — Mon, 13 Jul 2020 15:06:14 +0000

If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.

Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) Irish author
“Truth and Fiction,” BBC Radio (Oct 1956)
(Source)

Bowen, Elizabeth -- “Truth and Fiction,” BBC Radio (Oct 1956)

Dave — Mon, 20 Jul 2020 19:30:38 +0000

A novel which survives, which withstands and outlives time, does do something more than merely survive. It does not stand still. It accumulates round itself the understanding of all these persons who bring to it something of their own. It acquires associations, it becomes a form of experience in itself, so that two people who meet can often make friends, find an approach to each other, because of this one great common experience they have had.

Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) Irish author
“Truth and Fiction,” BBC Radio (Oct 1956)
(Source)

Bowen, Elizabeth -- Encounters, Preface to the 1951 Edition (1923)

Dave — Mon, 27 Jul 2020 17:23:41 +0000

The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.

Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) Irish author
Encounters, Preface to the 1951 Edition (1923)
(Source)

Bowen, Elizabeth -- Pictures and Conversations, ch. 1 (1975)

Dave — Mon, 10 Aug 2020 14:52:15 +0000

As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with “characters,” or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons “in history.” History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.

Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) Irish author
Pictures and Conversations, ch. 1 (1975)
(Source)

Bowen, Elizabeth -- Stories by Elizabeth Bowen, Preface (1959)

Dave — Mon, 06 Jul 2020 18:37:25 +0000

To return to the matter of the persona, I repeat that one cannot wholly eliminate oneself for a second, and also sufficient, reason: any fiction (and surely poetry too?) is bound to be transposed autobiography. (True, it may be this at so many removes as to defeat recognition.) I can, and indeed if i would not I still must, relate any and every story I have written to something that happened to me in my own life. But here I am speaking of happenings in a broad sense — to behold and react, is where I am concerned a happening; speculations, unaccountable stirs of interest, longings, attractions, apprehensions without knowable cause — these are happenings, also.

Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) Irish author
Stories by Elizabeth Bowen, Preface (1959)
(Source)

Bowen, Elizabeth -- The Death of the Heart (1938)

Dave — Sun, 01 Feb 2004 16:00:00 +0000

Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.

Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) Irish author
The Death of the Heart (1938)

Bowen, Elizabeth -- The Death of the Heart (1938)

Dave — Sun, 01 Feb 2004 16:00:00 +0000

Experience isn’t interesting till it begins to repeat itself — in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.

Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) Irish author
The Death of the Heart (1938)

Bowen, Elizabeth -- The Death of the Heart (1938)

Dave — Wed, 21 Jun 2017 00:41:25 +0000

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out.

Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) Irish author
The Death of the Heart (1938)
(Source)

See Propertius.

Bowen, Elizabeth -- The House in Paris (1935)

Dave — Sun, 01 Feb 2004 16:00:00 +0000

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) Irish author
The House in Paris (1935)

Bowen, Elizabeth -- The House in Paris (1935)

Dave — Sun, 01 Feb 2004 16:00:00 +0000

Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.

Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) Irish author
The House in Paris (1935)

Bowen, Elizabeth -- The House in Paris (1935)

Dave — Wed, 12 May 2004 19:24:16 +0000

No object is mysterious; the mystery is in your eye.

Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) Irish author
The House in Paris (1935)

Bowen, Elizabeth -- The Last September, Preface (1929)

Dave — Mon, 17 Aug 2020 15:08:49 +0000

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.

Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) Irish author
The Last September, Preface (1929)
(Source)

Bowen, Elizabeth -- The Little Girls, ch. 7 (1964)

Dave — Thu, 28 Apr 2022 15:52:49 +0000

We were entrusted to one another, in the days which mattered, Clare thought. Entrusted to one another by chance, not choice. Chance, and its agents time and place. Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. In its carelessness it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man. You — she thought, looking at the bed — chanced not chose to want us again.

Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) Irish author
The Little Girls, ch. 7 (1964)
(Source)

Quoted, in abbreviated form, in the foreword to her Pictures and Conversations (1975):

Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man.

Bowen, Elizabeth -- The Second Ghost Book, Preface (1952) [ed. C. Asquith]

Dave — Mon, 03 Aug 2020 14:25:38 +0000

Ghosts seem harder to please than we are; it is as though they haunted for haunting’s sake — much as we relive, brood, and smoulder over our pasts.

Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) Irish author
The Second Ghost Book, Preface (1952) [ed. C. Asquith]
(Source)

Bowen, Elizabeth -- Letter to Graham Greene, quoted in Why Do I Write? (1948)

Dave — Mon, 24 Aug 2020 16:40:20 +0000

I am sure that in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt … the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.

Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) Irish author
Letter to Graham Greene, quoted in Why Do I Write? (1948)

Ellipses in the original.