Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

177 Sourced Quotes

The coldness had been admitted by none of the seven or eight people who, in degrees of elderly beauty, sat here full in the sun, at this sheltered edge of the lawn: they continued to master the coldness, or to deny it, as though with each it were some secret malaise.

Elizabeth Bowen
And yet in a way I would rather fail point blank. Things one can do have no value. I don't mind feeling small myself, but I dread finding the world is.

Elizabeth Bowen
The children worked on each other like two indestructible pieces of sand-paper.

Elizabeth Bowen
Looking back at a repetition of empty days, one sees that monuments have sprung up. Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie: when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.

Elizabeth Bowen
In big houses in which things are done properly, there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.

Elizabeth Bowen
Two things are terrible in childhood: helplessness (being in other people's power) and apprehension — the apprehension that something is being concealed from us because it is too bad to be told.

Elizabeth Bowen
Going to meet a stranger or semi-stranger, can you help asking yourself what they are coming to meet?

Elizabeth Bowen
There's something so showy about desperation, it takes hard wits to see it's a grandiose form of funk.

Elizabeth Bowen
Sacrificers... are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those that they sacrifice. Oh, the sacrificers, they get it both ways. A person knows themselves that they're able to do without.

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

Elizabeth Bowen
Memory must be patchy; what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out — unique to oneself, one's own, one's claim to identity, it implicates one's identity in its fibbing.

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

Elizabeth Bowen
Love dreads being isolated, being left to speak in a void — at the beginning it would often rather listen than speak.

Elizabeth Bowen
To leap is not only to leap, it is to hit the ground somewhere.

Elizabeth Bowen
The most steady, the most self-sufficient nature depends, more than it knows, on its few chosen stimuli.

Elizabeth Bowen
Story involves action. Action towards an end not to be foreseen (by the reader) but also towards an end which, having been reached, must be seen to have been from the start inevitable.

Elizabeth Bowen
In my experience one thing you don't learn from is anything anyone set up to be a lesson; what you are to know you pick up as you go along.

Elizabeth Bowen
The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaited him—a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured—captured by some experience to which one may have given hardly a thought.

Elizabeth Bowen
Forgiveness should be an act, but this is a state with him.

Elizabeth Bowen
There is no doubt that sorrow brings one down in the world. The aristocratic privilege of silence belongs, you soon find out, to only the happy state or, at least, to the state when pain keeps within bounds.

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
Every love has a poetic relevance of its own; each love brings to light only what to it is relevant. Outside lies the junk-yard of what does not matter.

Elizabeth Bowen
We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.

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 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