Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

I don't think Ireland has ever had a genius for the novel. Of course, there were plenty of Irish novels, but I don't think that was ever the natural means of expression for the Irish.

Earth, receive an honored guest; William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.

My Dublin wasn't the Dublin of sing-songs, traditional music, sense of history and place and community.

I'm proud of my Irish heritage and culture and this show will feature a lot of Irish dancing.

Growing up, I was brought up around Irish music, Irish traditions.

I think there's something about the Irish experience - that we had to have a sense of humor or die.

I had grown up as an Irish poet in a country where the distance between vision and imagination was not quite as wide as in some other countries.

I think most Irish people are creative. Whether it's music, or dance, or... certainly storytelling is in the blood.

I was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland and it is still home to me. My writing has taken me all over the world, but this is the place I come back to and the place where I find it easiest to write.

Ireland is not at all a simple place, and in many ways it is spare and sad. It has no wealth, no power, no stability, no influence, no fashion, no size. Its only real arts are song and drama and poem. But Limerick alone has two thousand ruined castles and surely that many practicing poets.

James Joyce wrote the definitive work about Dublin while he was living in Switzerland. We're all where we come from. We all have our roots.

And in spite of everything, Ireland remains the brain of the Kingdom. The English, judiciously practical and ponderous, furnish the over-stuffed stomach of humanity with a perfect gadget--the water closet. The Irish, condemned to express themselves in a language not their own, have stamped on it the mark of their own genius and compete for glory with the civilized nations. This is then called English literature.

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

The life of the arts is far from an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is close to the center of a nation's purpose-and is a test of the quality of a nations' civilization.

I enter a whorehouse with the same interest as I do the British museum or the Metropolitan - in the same spirit of curiosity. Here are the works of man, here is an art of man, here is the eternal pursuit of gold and pleasure. I couldn't be more sincere. This doesn't mean that if I go to La Scala in Milan to hear Carmen I want to get up on the stage and participate. I do not. Neither do I always participate in a fine representative national whorehouse - but I must see it as a spectacle, an offering, a symptom of a nation.

The Irishman in English literature may be said to have been born with an apology in his mouth.

I'd rather be home alone, painting.

I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that art should never be anything else.

Theatre can transform a child's life, just as an early cultural experience whether with opera, ballet, music or art is a wonderful thing because it opens the door to a life-long experience, a life-long enjoyment.

To be an Irish poet after that 19th century in which there was such a struggle toward the light, I think still will always be in the hearts of the writers of my generation and the generations before and hopefully the generations after.

In a study, scientists report that drinking beer can be good for the liver. I'm sorry, did I say 'scientists'? I meant Irish people.

I was in love with a whirlwind, so when the girl threw me over, I went home and finished my novel.

A nation devoid of art and artists cannot have a full existence.

I am very fond of the people, landscape, poetry, music, history and the Guinness. Being there makes me think of my mother and my grandmother - always sentimental and warm thoughts.

The arts are not a luxury. They are an integral part of our lives as individuals and as a nation.