Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

177 Sourced Quotes

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

Elizabeth Bowen
Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope, it is impossible.

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
It is about five o'clock in an evening that the first hour of spring strikes—autumn arrives in the early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.

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

Elizabeth Bowen
Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.

Elizabeth Bowen
This is the worst of love, this unmeant mystification — someone smiling and going out without saying where, or a letter arriving, being read in your presence, put away, not explained, or: "No, alas, I can't to-night" on the telephone — that, one person having set up without knowing, the other cannot undo without the where? who? why? that brings them both down a peg. Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

Elizabeth Bowen
I suppose art is the only thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.

Elizabeth Bowen
Nothing, that is say no one, can be such an inexorable tour-conductor as one's own conscience or sense of duty, if one allows either the upper hand: the self-bullying that goes on in the name of sight-seeing is grievous.

Elizabeth Bowen
One should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.

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

Elizabeth Bowen
Goodbyes breed a sort of distaste for whomever you say goodbye to; this hurts, you feel; this must not happen again.

Elizabeth Bowen
I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never.

Elizabeth Bowen
We can surmount the anger we feel. To find oneself like a young tree inside a tomb is to discover the power to crack the tomb and grow up to any height.

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

Elizabeth Bowen
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
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
He diagnosed her as prey to one creeping growth, the Past, septic with what had happened.

Elizabeth Bowen
Social activity right on top of a crisis had the same effect on Cecilia nervously as, on her inside, exercise taken too soon after a meal: undigested experience hung heavily on her spirit.

Elizabeth Bowen
Fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.

Elizabeth Bowen
But she had told them nothing, given them the stone of her abstract, colourless idealism while they sat there, open-mouthed for sentimental bread.

Elizabeth Bowen
One can suffer a convulsion of one's entire nature, and, unless it makes some noise, no one notices. It's not just that we are incurious; we completely lack any sense of each other's existences.

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

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
Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

Elizabeth Bowen
Often when I write I am trying to make words do the work of line and color. I have the painter's sensitivity to light. Much... of my writing is verbal painting.

Elizabeth Bowen