Elizabeth Bowen Quotes
"Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak."
- Elizabeth Bowen
"Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Hope, Pity, Selfishness)
"One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Idea, Shadow)
"That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Women, Being, Fiction)
"Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Truth)
"The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Lie, Victims)
"No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Eye, Mystery)
"Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Nothing)
"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
(Related: Effort)
"The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: People, Heart, Absence, Friends, May, Senses)
"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
"Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Lie)
"The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved is part of one's self-respect."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Feeling, Self)
"There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Children, End, Talking)
"We are minor in everything but our passions."
- Elizabeth Bowen
"When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Love, Wishes)
"Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Experience, Fact)
"The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: First, Importance, Value, Writer, Writing)
"Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: War, Cruelty, Fantasy, World, World war)
"Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Fate)
"All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Greatness, Want, Youth)
"Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Art)
"Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: People, Idea, Meeting)
"Education is not so important as people think."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Education, People)
"I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am."
- Elizabeth Bowen
"I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Road)
"If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Idea)
"Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Thought, Difficulties, Language)
"Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Art, Feeling)
"Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Women, Beginning, Ending, Talk)
"Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Autumn, Day, Spring, Winter)
"Ireland is a great country to die or be married in."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Country, Ireland)
"It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Friend, Help)
"Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Enemies, Feeling, Jealousy)
"Language is a mixture of statement and evocation."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Language)
"If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Life, Cause)