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Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

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Famous Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

“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.”

KnowsPersonsCharacterWould BeActionRomancePassionHistoryMajorsUltimateRateNovelistsIncapableAmbiguityPanache
Author:Elizabeth Bowen
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“What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.”

KnowsWantFeelsMayMeanStoriesRealityTruthFictionNovelImpossibleReaderAdultsTestsRingsTalesFantasticFairyFairy TaleRealismTrue Life
Author:Elizabeth Bowen
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“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.”

PeoplePersonsDoeStillsTwoFormReadingUnderstandingCommunityCommonNovelApproachRoundsAcquireAssociationLife TimeCommon Experience
Author:Elizabeth Bowen
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“The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance--due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author's attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful--and possibly the only--help that can be given.”

HelpingYoungGivenAttentionFictionDirectCriticismFaultsDuesNovelistsInfatuationImperativesRelevanceIndecisionIrrelevance
Book:Pictures and conversations
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“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.”

MeanFactsStoriesLawTermFictionNovelAdvantageClaimsBoundsNarrativeAnalysisExplanationPoetry IsShort StoryVisionariesKinship
Book:Stories
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