Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.

Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.

When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.

We are minor in everything but our passions.

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

Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.

Disappointment tears the bearable film off life.

It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.

somehow at parties at which one stays standing up one seems to require to be more concentratedly intelligent than one does at those at which one can sit down.

Certain books come to meet me, as do people.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

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

Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man.

Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.

we can surmount the anger we feel. To find oneself like a young tree inside a tomb is to discover the power to crack the tomb and grow up to any height.

Autumn arrives in the early morning.

Spoilt pleasure is a sad, unseemly thing; you can only bury it.

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.

Silences can be as different as sounds.

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 most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance--due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author's attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful--and possibly the only--help that can be given.

Jane Austen, much in advance of her day, was a mistress of the use of the dialogue. She used it as dialogue should be used-to advance the story; not only to show the characters, but to advance.

The writer, unlike his non-writing adult friend, has no predisposed outlook; he seldom observes deliberately. He sees what he didnot intend to see; he remembers what does not seem wholly possible. Inattentive learner in the schoolroom of life, he keeps some faculty free to veer and wander. His is the roving eye.

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.

Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.

With three or more people there is something bold in the air: direct things get said which would frighten two people alone and conscious of each inch of their nearness to one another. To be three is to be in public - you feel safe.

A romantic man often feels more uplifted with two women than with one: his love seems to hit the ideal mark somewhere between two different faces.

Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.

She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her.

Who is ever adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't.

The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved is part of one's self-respect.

Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.

If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.

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

But complex people are never certain that they are not crooks, never certain their passports are quite in order, and are, therefore, unnerved by the slightest thing.

All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.

The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.

First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences, gestures, attitudes, a burning phrase with no context.

Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone the pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude. She had never landed at Cork, so this hill and that hill beyond were as unexpected as pictures at which you say "Oh look!" Nobody was beside her to share the moment, which would have been imperfect with anyone else there.

What's the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually - our sense of personality is a sense of outrage.

The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.

The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.

We have really no absent friends.

As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.

It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.

Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.

I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.