Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.

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

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

If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.

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

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.

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.

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

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.

Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant; impossible socially, but full scale; and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.

Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.

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.

It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.

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

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

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

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

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.

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.

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

It is in this unearthly first hour of spring twilight that earth's almost agonized livingness is most felt. This hour is so dreadful to some people that they hurry indoors and turn on the lights.