Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

177 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elizabeth Bowen
Young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate; they like to have loud chords struck on them.

Elizabeth Bowen
She liked to receive confidences if these were conferred prettily, with some suggestion of her own specialness, not dropped on her toes all anyhow, like a bulky valise someone is anxious to put down.

Elizabeth Bowen
One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.

Elizabeth Bowen
Without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold.

Elizabeth Bowen
Characters should on the whole, be under rather than over articulate. What they intend to say should be more evident, more striking (because of its greater inner importance to the plot) than what they arrive at saying.

Elizabeth Bowen
She had to confess inexperience; her personality was still too much for her, like a punt-pole.

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

Elizabeth Bowen
No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life--the first twenty years of it--had about them something semi-fictitious.

Elizabeth Bowen
Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft...

Elizabeth Bowen
To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.

Elizabeth Bowen
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.

Elizabeth Bowen
I pity people who do not care for Society. They are poorer for the oblation they do not make.

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

Elizabeth Bowen