No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.
Elizabeth BowenRead
When I read a story, I relive the moment from which it sprang. A scene burned itself into me, a building magnetized me, a mood orseason of Nature's penetrated me, history suddenly appeared to me in some tiny act, or a face had begun to haunt me before I glanced at it.
Interpretation
The quote expresses how stories and experiences can deeply impact and resonate with a person.
In this quote, Elizabeth Bowen reflects on the profound connection between readers and the stories they encounter. She describes how a story can evoke vivid memories and emotions, transforming the act of reading into a deeply personal experience where each scene and detail leaves a lasting impression on the reader's psyche.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a book club meeting to emphasize the emotional impact of literature.
No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart.
Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer's take-down of a 'real life' conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.
Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.
The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaited him--a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured--captured by some experience to which one may have given hardly a thought.
One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
The real test of a musician is live performance. It's one thing to spend a long time learning how to play well in the studio, but to do it in front of people is what keeps me coming back to touring.
Relating a person to the whole world: that is the meaning of cinema.
One of the obsessions that the Soviet Union and the Eastern European communist parties had was always controlling the message - all information that everybody gets has to be carefully controlled and monitored. Art was no exception.
Gay writers now have both a sense of history and the fables that allows them to dwell in the realms of the ridiculous and at the same time talk seriously about things.
Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.
So often when Black men have to play roles on TV, we're either the noble savage or we're completely a savage, and there's no nuance.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.