Elizabeth Bowen was an Irish novelist and short story writer. She was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1899 and died in 1973 in London, England. She wrote several novels and short stories, often focusing on the conflict between the old world and the new, as well as the themes of love, loss, and identity.
What is the most famous quote by Elizabeth Bowen ?
One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
— Elizabeth Bowen
What can you learn from Elizabeth Bowen (Life Lessons)
- Elizabeth Bowen's works often explore the complexities of human relationships, emphasizing the importance of understanding and compassion. Through her stories, she teaches us to be mindful of our actions and to recognize the consequences of our choices.
- Bowen's works also emphasize the importance of self-reflection, encouraging us to take time to examine our own thoughts and feelings. She reminds us that our lives are shaped by our innermost thoughts and emotions, and that we must strive to be honest with ourselves.
- Finally, Bowen's works emphasize the importance of being present in the moment and savoring life's joys. She encourages us to appreciate the beauty of life, even in the face of adversity.
The most almighty Elizabeth Bowen quotes that are free to learn and impress others
Following is a list of the best quotes, including various Elizabeth Bowen inspirational quotes, and other famous sayings by Elizabeth Bowen.
Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
When you love someone all your saved-up wishes start coming out.
When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.
Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.
Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.
We are minor in everything but our passions.
Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.
Feminist quotes by Elizabeth Bowen
Disappointment tears the bearable film off life.
Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
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.
Spoilt pleasure is a sad, unseemly thing; you can only bury it.
Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.
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.
Quotations by Elizabeth Bowen that are modernist and realist
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 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.
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 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.
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.
Autumn arrives in the early morning.
Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
Absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
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.
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.
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
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.
Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
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.
All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts; it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called 'eternal.' What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.
Good-byes breed a sort of distaste for whomever you say good-bye to; this hurts, you feel, this must not happen again.
Dialogue should convey a sense of spontaneity but eliminate the repetitiveness of real talk.
... in general, the Anglo-Irish do not make good dancers; they are too spritely and conscious; they are incapable of one kind of trance or of being seemingly impersonal. And, for the formal, pure dance they lack the formality: about their stylishness (for they have stylishness) there is something impromptu, slightly disorderly.
Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.
We have really no absent friends.
What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.
The most steady, the most self-sufficient nature depends, more than it knows, on its few chosen stimuli.
No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.
Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.
Education is not so important as people think.
Some ideas, like dandelions in lawns, strike tenaciously: you may pull off the top but the root remains, drives down suckers and may even sprout again.
Ghosts seem harder to please than we are; it is as though they haunted for haunting’s sake -- much as we relive, brood, and smoulder over our pasts.
Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little-even if one did once know what one meant
With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.
Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.