Elizabeth Bowen Quotes (48 Quotes)

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.

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

It could've been a disaster for people who couldn't see it on TV, so to speak. The fact that it was incorrect on TV alarmed me.

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

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.

It is in this unearthly first hour of spring twilight that earth's almost agonized livingness is most felt. This hour is so dreadful to some people that they hurry indoors and turn on the lights.

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

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

We are minor in everything but our passions.

Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.

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

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

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

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

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

There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

Intimacies between women go backwards, beginning with revelations and ending up in small talk without loss of esteem.

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

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

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

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

Education is not so important as people think.

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

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

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

Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

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

If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.

Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant - impossible socially, but full-scale - and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our intercourse from utter banality

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

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

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

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.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is in your eyes.

Good-byes breed a sort of distaste for whomever you say good-bye to this hurts, you feel, this must not happen again.

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

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