Bowen

Famous quotes containing the word bowen:

    Imagination of my kind is most caught, most fired, most worked upon by the unfamiliar: I have thriven ... on the changes and chances, the dislocations and ... contrasts which have made up so much of my life.
    —Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)

    Ghosts, we hope, may be always with us—that is, never too far out of the reach of fancy. On the whole, it would seem they adapt themselves well, perhaps better than we do, to changing world conditions—they enlarge their domain, shift their hold on our nerves, and, dispossessed of one habitat, set up house in another. The universal battiness of our century looks like providing them with a propitious climate ...
    —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)