Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

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.

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

Disappointment tears the bearable film off life.

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

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

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

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

We have really no absent friends.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Education is not so important as people think.

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.

... 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.

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.