SubscribeElizabeth Bowen Love Quotes and Sayings
Posted on Oct 09, 2008 under Anglo-Irish Novelist, CBE, E, Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen, James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Short Story Writer | No CommentElizabeth Bowen Love Quote and Sayings
1. When you love someone, all your saved-up wishes start coming out.
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Excerpt from Wikipedia: Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen, CBE (7 June 1899 – 22 February 1973) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer. Bowen was born in Dublin and later brought to Bowen’s Court in County Cork where she spent her summers. When her father became mentally ill in 1907, she and her mother moved to England, eventually settling in Hythe. After her mother died in 1912, Bowen was brought up by her aunts.
She was educated at Downe House School, under the headship of Olive Willis. After some time at art school in London she decided that her talent lay in writing. She mixed with the Bloomsbury Group, becoming good friends with Rose Macaulay, who helped her find a publisher for her first book, Encounters (1923).
In 1923 she married Alan Cameron, an educational administrator who subsequently worked for the BBC. The marriage has been described as “a sexless but contented union”. She had various extra-marital relationships, including one with Charles Ritchie, a Canadian diplomat seven years her junior, which lasted over thirty years. She also had an affair with the Irish writer Sean O Faolain and at least one lesbian entanglement, with the American poet, May Sarton.
Bowen inherited Bowen’s Court in 1930, but remained based in England, making frequent visits to Ireland. During World War II she worked for the British Ministry of Information, reporting on Irish opinion, particularly on the issue of Irish neutrality.
Her husband retired in 1952 and they settled in Bowen’s Court, where Alan Cameron died a few months later. For years Bowen struggled to keep the house going, lecturing in the United States to earn money. In 1959 the house was sold and demolished.
Bowen received recognition for her work, being awarded the 1969 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Eva Trout as well as Doctorates in Literature from Trinity College, Dublin (1949) and the University of Oxford (1952). She was also awarded the CBE.
After spending some years without a permanent home, Bowen settled in Hythe and died of cancer in 1973, aged 73. She is buried with her husband in Farahy church yard, close to the gates of Bowen’s Court. A commemoration of her life is held annually in Farahy church.
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Famous Sayings by Elizabeth Bowen
1.All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
2. Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
3. Experience isn’t interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.
4. If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
5. It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
6. Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one’s outlook; it only confirms one’s idea that one is unique.
7. The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.
