Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

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

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

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.

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

Absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.

Education is not so important as people think.

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.

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

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

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

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

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

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

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

[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.

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

... into the novel goes such taste as I have for rational behaviour and social portraiture. The short story, as I see it to be, allows for what is crazy about humanity: obstinacies, inordinate heroisms, "immortal longings.

No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life--the first twenty years of it--had about them something semi-fictitious.

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

This, my first [bicycle] had an intrinsic beauty.

And it opened for me an era of all but flying, which roads emptily crossing theairy, gold-gorsy Common enhanced. Nothing since has equalled that birdlike freedom.

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

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

Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.

... it appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy, little is quite impossible.

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

... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.

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.

... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.

Almost everyone admits to hunger during the Opera.

... Hunger is so exalting that during a last act you practically levitate.

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.

Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.

... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

...though one can be callous in Ireland one cannot be wholly opaque or material. An unearthly disturbance works in the spirit; reason can never reconcile one to life; nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.

...the power-loving temperament is more dangerous when it either prefers or is forced to operate in what is materially a void. Wehave everything to dread from the dispossessed.

We are minor in everything but our passions.

All my life I have said, "Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs"--and what a mistake.

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.

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.

Autumn arrives in the early morning.

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.

Imagination of my kind is most caught, most fired, most worked upon by the unfamiliar: I have thrivenon the changes and chances, the dislocations andcontrasts which have made up so much of my life.

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

All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted;

when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.

But in general, for the purposes of most novelists, the number of objects genuinely necessary for. . .describing a scene will be found to be very small.

Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself.

In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.

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