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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Autumn arrives in the early morning.

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

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.

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.

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

Silences can be as different as sounds.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.

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

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

What is being said is the effect of something that has happened; at the same time, what is being said is in itself something happening, which will, in turn, leave its effect.

We have really no absent friends.

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 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.

Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

The story must spring from an impression or perception pressing enough to have made the writer write. It should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure.

Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.

Dialogue should convey a sense of spontaneity but eliminate the repetitiveness of real talk.