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.

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

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

Education is not so important as people think.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

We are minor in everything but our passions.

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.

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.

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

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.