Bowen

Famous quotes containing the word bowen:

    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.
    —Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)

    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)

    ... 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.
    —Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)