110+ Elizabeth Bowen Quotes On Education, Family And Writing A Novel

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. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Elizabeth Bowen on education, love, family.

Top 10 Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

1. One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
2. Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
3. Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
4. When you love someone all your saved-up wishes start coming out.
5. When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.
6. Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.
7. Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.
8. We are minor in everything but our passions.
9. Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.
10. Disappointment tears the bearable film off life.

Elizabeth Bowen Image Quotes

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies. — Elizabeth Bowen

When you love someone all your saved-up wishes start coming out. — Elizabeth Bowen

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

Elizabeth Bowen Short Quotes

• 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.
• Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.
• Spoilt pleasure is a sad, unseemly thing; you can only bury it.
• Autumn arrives in the early morning.
• Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
• Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
• It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.
• Dialogue should convey a sense of spontaneity but eliminate the repetitiveness of real talk.

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes About Love

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. — Elizabeth Bowen

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. — Elizabeth Bowen

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. — Elizabeth Bowen

Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear? — Elizabeth Bowen

whenever possible I avoid talking. Reprieve from talking is my idea of a holiday. At risk of seeming unsociable, which I am, I admit I love to be left in a beatific trance, when I am in one. Friendly Romans recognize that wish. — Elizabeth Bowen

People in love, in whom every sense is open, cannot beat off the influence of a place. — Elizabeth Bowen

Love of privacy - perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society - has become in many people almost pathological. — Elizabeth Bowen

memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup. — Elizabeth Bowen

Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love. — Elizabeth Bowen

Every love has a poetic relevance of its own; each love brings to light only what to it is relevant. Outside lies the junk-yard of what does not matter. — Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes About Writing A Novel

Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market - you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane; another won't get over the right stile. — Elizabeth Bowen

Short of a small range of physical acts-a fight, murder, lovemaking-dialogue is the most vigorous and visible inter-action of which characters in a novel are capable. Speech is what characters do to each other. — Elizabeth Bowen

Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer's take-down of a 'real life' conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed. — Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes About People

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. — Elizabeth Bowen

Absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. — Elizabeth Bowen

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

Education is not so important as people think. — Elizabeth Bowen

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. — Elizabeth Bowen

very young people are true but not resounding instruments. — Elizabeth Bowen

Also, perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all. — Elizabeth Bowen

Two things are terrible in childhood: helplessness (being in other people's power) and apprehension - the apprehension that something is being concealed from us because it is too bad to be told. — Elizabeth Bowen

Grown-up people seem to be busy by clockwork... They run their unswerving course from object to object, directed by some mysterious inner needle that points all the time to what they must do next. You can only marvel at such misuse of time. — Elizabeth Bowen

For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal. — Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes About Small

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

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

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. — Elizabeth Bowen

At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial games could be played. — Elizabeth Bowen

The charm, one might say the genius of memory, is that it is choosy, chancy, and temperamental: it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust. — Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Famous Quotes And Sayings

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies. — Elizabeth Bowen

When you love someone all your saved-up wishes start coming out. — Elizabeth Bowen

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

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. — Elizabeth Bowen

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. — Elizabeth Bowen

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. — Elizabeth Bowen

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. — Elizabeth Bowen

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. — Elizabeth Bowen

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

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

... 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. — Elizabeth Bowen

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

Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain. — Elizabeth Bowen

We have really no absent friends. — Elizabeth Bowen

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. — Elizabeth Bowen

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye. — Elizabeth Bowen

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

Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing. — Elizabeth Bowen

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. — Elizabeth Bowen

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

What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else. — Elizabeth Bowen

The most steady, the most self-sufficient nature depends, more than it knows, on its few chosen stimuli. — Elizabeth Bowen

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. — Elizabeth Bowen

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. — Elizabeth Bowen

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 — Elizabeth Bowen

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

Almost everyone admits to hunger during the Opera.... Hunger is so exalting that during a last act you practically levitate. — Elizabeth Bowen

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

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

Art is for [the Irish] inseparable from artifice: of that, the theatre is the home. Possibly, it was England made me a novelist. — Elizabeth Bowen

The silence of a shut park does not sound like country silence: it is tense and confined. — Elizabeth Bowen

There's something so showy about desperation, it takes hard wits to see it's a grandiose form of funk. — Elizabeth Bowen

The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaited him--a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured--captured by some experience to which one may have given hardly a thought. — Elizabeth Bowen

Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland. — Elizabeth Bowen

After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee. — Elizabeth Bowen

Plot is the knowing of destination. — Elizabeth Bowen

All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented. — Elizabeth Bowen

I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experiences, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true. — Elizabeth Bowen

Though not all reading children grow up to be writers, I take it that most creative writers must in their day have been reading children. — Elizabeth Bowen

nothing is more restful than conformity. — Elizabeth Bowen

There is no doubt that sorrow brings one down in the world. The aristocratic privilege of silence belongs, you soon find out, to only the happy state- or, at least, to the state when pain keeps within bounds. — Elizabeth Bowen

Roughly, the action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown. In the first half of a novel, the unpredictability should be the more striking. In the second half, the inevitability should be the more striking. — Elizabeth Bowen

In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed. — Elizabeth Bowen

Sacrificers ... are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those that they sacrifice. Oh, the sacrificers, they get it both ways. A person knows themselves that they're able to do without. — Elizabeth Bowen

without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold. — Elizabeth Bowen

nobody ever dies of an indignity. — Elizabeth Bowen

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

... 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. — Elizabeth Bowen

A Bowen, in the first place, made Bowen's Court. Since then, with a rather alarming sureness, Bowen's Court has made all the succeeding Bowens. — Elizabeth Bowen

Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company. — Elizabeth Bowen

Dialogue should show the relationships among people. — Elizabeth Bowen

I am fully intelligent only when I write. I have a certain amount of small-change intelligence, which I carry round with me as, at any rate in a town, one has to carry small money, for the needs of the day, the non-writing day. But it seems to me I seldom purely think ... if I thought more I might write less. — Elizabeth Bowen

life is a succession of readjustments. — Elizabeth Bowen

Have not all poetic truths been already stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be final. — Elizabeth Bowen

...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. — Elizabeth Bowen

One's sentiments -- call them that -- one's fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: only when they are betrayed or, worse still, when one betrays them does one realize their power. — Elizabeth Bowen

...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. — Elizabeth Bowen

the slight sense of degeneracy induced by reading novels before luncheon — Elizabeth Bowen

every short story is an experiment - what one must ask is not only, did it come off, but was it, as an experiment, worth making? — Elizabeth Bowen

The passion of vanity has its own depths in the spirit, and is powerfully militant. — Elizabeth Bowen

Certain books come to meet me, as do people. — Elizabeth Bowen

children like change - for one thing, they never anticipate regret. — Elizabeth Bowen

in my experience one thing you don't learn from is anything anyone set up to be a lesson; what you are to know you pick up as you go along. — Elizabeth Bowen

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

Story involves action. Action towards an end not to be foreseen (by the reader) but also towards an end which, having been reached, must be seen to have been from the start inevitable. — Elizabeth Bowen

...there must be something she wanted; and that therefore she was no lady. — Elizabeth Bowen

Dogs are a habit, I think. — Elizabeth Bowen

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. — Elizabeth Bowen

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. — Elizabeth Bowen

Revenge was a very wild kind of justice. — Elizabeth Bowen

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. — Elizabeth Bowen

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. — Elizabeth Bowen

Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at? — Elizabeth Bowen

The Irish landowner, partly from laziness but also from an indifferent delicacy, does not interfere in the lives of the people round. Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland, but these cannot operate the whole time: on the whole, the landowner leaves his tenants and work-people to make their own mistakes, while he makes his. — Elizabeth Bowen

Forgiveness should be an act, but this is a state with him. — Elizabeth Bowen

I do like Italian graves; they look so much more lived in. — Elizabeth Bowen

Wariness had driven away poetry; from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could. — Elizabeth Bowen

Princess Bibesco delighted in a semi-ideal world - a world which, though having a counterpart in her experience, was to a great extent brought into being by her own temperament and, one might say, flair. — Elizabeth Bowen

Life Lessons by Elizabeth Bowen

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.