It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

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About Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen CBE (; 7 June 1899 – 22 February 1973) was an Irish-British novelist and short story writer notable for her books about the "big house" of Irish landed Protestants as well as her fiction about life in wartime London.

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Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.

—Elizabeth Bowen

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Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.

—Elizabeth Bowen

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Grown-up people seem to be busy by clockwork. . . . They run their unswerving course from object to object, directed by some mysterious inner needle that points all the time to what they must do next. You can only marvel at such misuse of time.

—Elizabeth Bowen

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Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.

—Elizabeth Bowen

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spring winter fall morning autumn

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Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.

—Elizabeth Bowen

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Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

—Edith Wharton

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Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

—Edith Wharton

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Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

—E. M. Forster

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I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

—Duke Ellington

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If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.