Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

I think that when a poem can move readers across generations and across its specific class or race then it becomes truly classic.

I'm the only person you've ever met who has read Longfellow.

I think that the best part of music is when it comes from a real place and has an ability to kind of connect on a much larger scale. It no longer is a personal thing, it becomes everyone else's thing as well.

Literature is news that stays news.

I tell the truth through music. Other people tend to catch on and agree with my truth and it turns out we are all really similar.

I think humor is a really important way of creating solidarity - like, through humor you can make people realize that certain situations, where they thought they were alone, are actually shared by everyone.

[Music] is the one thing that connects the dots in all kinds of ways. No matter how you were brought up, no matter what your religious background or political beliefs, people still love to sing along with somebody.

If you put your personal stories out there people always connect.

Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song.

What that’s allowed me to do is have a vantage point about my own life that's accessible to people still. I could see a guy walking down the street and be like, Even though I'm famous, I got more in common with this guy than, like, Brad Pitt.

It creates community when you talk about private things and you can find other people that have the same things.

What's great about art is that if you can reach people, if they hear or see what you do and it moves them, there's a commonality.

Architecture is not a private affair; even a house must serve a whole family and its friends, and most buildings are used by everybody, people of all walks of life. If a building is to meet the needs of all the people, the architect must look for some common ground of understanding and experience.

But the dance speaks to everyone. Otherwise it wouldn't work.

...I told him a story of two people. Two people who shouldn't have met, and who didn't like each other much when they did, but who found they were the only two people in the world who could possibly have understood each other.

They have written volumes out of which a couplet of verse, a period in prose, may cling to the rock of ages, as a shell that survives a deluge.

There are a lot of people out there that really aren't that different than me, I consider myself a pretty average guy, so hopefully they understand me and know where I am coming from. I kinda feel like I am a voice for them.

Some people meet each other again only when I'm there!

A reading is a kind of communion. The poet articulates the semi-known for the tribe.

My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours.

A classic is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation. Then it's safe, like a style in architecture or furniture. It's acquired a picturesque dignity to take the place of its fashion.

On the day long after childhood when I suddenly heard of his death, the sky grew dark above my head. I was walking on a Southern highway, and a friend driving in a pony carriage passed me, stopped and said, "Have you heard that Charles Dickens is dead?" It was as if I had been robbed of one of my dearest friends.

It's never fun to do it by yourself. It's good to have other people that are on the same path as you. It's nice to have that in common and be able to converse with them. It's cool to share that.

Horace, in a particularly boastful mood, once said his verse would last as long as the vestal virgins kept going up the Capitoline Hill to worship at the temple of Jupiter. But Horace's poetry has lasted longer than Jupiter's religion, and Jupiter himself has only survived because he disappeared into literature.

I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.