Catherine Drinker Bowen quotes
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“For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.”
-- Catherine Drinker Bowen -
“Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.”
-- Catherine Drinker Bowen -
“Writing is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living.”
-- Catherine Drinker Bowen -
“Chamber music - a conversation between friends.”
-- Catherine Drinker Bowen#Friendship Quotes #Chamber Music Quotes #Conversation Quotes
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“People who carry a musical soul about them are, I think, more receptive than others. They smile more readily. One feels in them a pleasant propensity toward the lesser sins, a pleasing readiness also to admit the possibility that on occasion they may be in the wrong--they may be mistaken.”
-- Catherine Drinker Bowen -
“One of the marks of true genius is a quality of abundance. A rich, rollicking abundance, enough to give indigestion to ordinary people. Great artists turn it out in rolls, in swatches. They cover whole ceilings with paintings, they chip out a mountainside in stone, they write not one novel but a shelf full. It follows that some of their work is better than other. As much as a third of it may be pretty bad. Shall we say this unevenness is the mark of their humanity - of their proud mortality as well as of their immortality?”
-- Catherine Drinker BowenSource : Catherine Drinker Bowen (1961). “The Nature of the Artist: An Address Delivered at the Dedication Ceremonies for Lee Pattison Recital Hall, Wilbur Hall, Mary Kimberly Residence Hall”
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“Artists often think they are going to die before their time. They seem to possess a heightened sense of the passing of the hours.”
-- Catherine Drinker Bowen -
“A woman's biography - with about eight famous historical exceptions - so often turns out to be the story of a man and the woman who helped his career.”
-- Catherine Drinker Bowen -
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“Biographers, by their very nature, want to know everything about everybody, dead or alive.”
-- Catherine Drinker Bowen -
“History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.”
-- Catherine Drinker Bowen -
“your concert-goer, though he feed upon symphony as a lamb upon milk, is no true lover if he play no instrument. Your true lover does more than admire the muse; he sweats a little in her service.”
-- Catherine Drinker BowenSource : Catherine Drinker Bowen (1939). “Friends and fiddlers”
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“I have noted that, barring accidents, artists whose powers wear best and last longest are those who have trained themselves to work under adversity. Great artists treasure their time with a bitter and snarling miserliness.”
-- Catherine Drinker BowenSource : Catherine Drinker Bowen (1961). “The Nature of the Artist: An Address Delivered at the Dedication Ceremonies for Lee Pattison Recital Hall, Wilbur Hall, Mary Kimberly Residence Hall”
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“What the writer needs is an empty day ahead.”
-- Catherine Drinker Bowen -
“All the others arts are lonely. We paint alone--my picture, my interpretation of the sky. My poem, my novel. But in music--ensemble music, not soloism--we share. No altruism this, for we receive tenfold what we give.”
-- Catherine Drinker BowenSource : Catherine Drinker Bowen (1939). “Friends and fiddlers”
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“If art has a purpose, it is to interpret life, reproduce it in fresh visions.”
-- Catherine Drinker BowenSource : Catherine Drinker Bowen (1959). “Adventures of a Biographer”, Boston : Little, Brown
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“In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.”
-- Catherine Drinker Bowen -
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“Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.”
-- Catherine Drinker Bowen -
“There is a marvelous turn and trick to British arrogance; its apparent unconsciousness makes it twice as effectual.”
-- Catherine Drinker BowenSource : Catherine Drinker Bowen (1959). “Adventures of a Biographer”, Boston : Little, Brown
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“Great artists treasure their time with a bitter and snarling miserliness.”
-- Catherine Drinker Bowen -
“It is a great, a pleasant thing to have a friend with whom to walk, untroubled, through the woods, by the stream, saying nothing, at peace--the heart all clean and quiet and empty, ready for the spirit that may choose to be its guest.”
-- Catherine Drinker BowenSource : Catherine Drinker Bowen (1939). “Friends and fiddlers”
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“In early days, I tried not to give librarians any trouble, which was where I made my primary mistake. Librarians like to be given trouble; they exist for it, they are geared to it. For the location of a mislaid volume, an uncatalogued item, your good librarian has a ferret’s nose. Give her a scent and she jumps the leash, her eye bright with battle.”
-- Catherine Drinker BowenSource : Catherine Drinker Bowen (1959). “Adventures of a Biographer”, Boston : Little, Brown
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“Many a man who has known himself at ten forgets himself utterly between ten and thirty.”
-- Catherine Drinker BowenSource : Commencement Speech by Anna Quindlen, www.mtholyoke.edu. 1999.
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