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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.”

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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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“I am dead against art's being self-expression. I see an inherent failure in any story which fails to detach itself from the author-detach itself in the sense that a well-blown soap-bubble detaches itself from the bowl of the blower's pipe and spherically takes off into the air as a new, whole, pure, iridescent world. Whereas the ill-blown bubble, as children know, timidly adheres to the bowl's lip, then either bursts or sinks flatly back again.”

KnowsWorldWellsChildrenArtSelfWholeStoriesFailingAirExpressionPureLipsIllMatureBubblesInherentBowlsSoapPipeSelf ExpressionBack AgainMature LoveIridescentSoap Bubbles
Author:Elizabeth Bowen
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