Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

177 Sourced Quotes

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
Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market — you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane; another won't get over the right stile.

Elizabeth Bowen
The straight sunny tombstones looked sociable, fresh wreaths were laid on the breasts of the graves. You could almost see the dead sitting up holding their flowers, like invalids on a visiting-day, waiting to hear the music. Only the very new dead, under raw earth with no tombstones, lay flat in despair.

Elizabeth Bowen
But to be quite oneself one must first waste a little time.

Elizabeth Bowen
She longed to occupy people's fancies, speculations and thoughts.

Elizabeth Bowen
Have not all poetic truths been already stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be final.

Elizabeth Bowen
"What's the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually— our sense of personality is a sense of outrage and we'll never get outside of it." But the hold of the country was that, she considered, it could be thought of in terms of oneself, so interpreted.

Elizabeth Bowen
In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.

Elizabeth Bowen
Cecilia's lunch party, having heard through the open door the first phrase of the interlude, had exchanged less than a glance and, all raising their voices, maintained a strenuous conversation till she came back. They were not English for nothing.

Elizabeth Bowen
I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.

Elizabeth Bowen
Some ideas, like dandelions in lawns, strike tenaciously: you may pull off the top but the root remains, drives down suckers and may even sprout again.

Elizabeth Bowen
Let's face it — who ever is adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't.

Elizabeth Bowen
Revenge was a very wild kind of justice...

Elizabeth Bowen
She had one of those charming faces which, according to the angle from which you see them, look either melancholy or impertinent. Her eyes were grey; her trick of narrowing them made her seem to reflect, the greater part of the time, in the dusk of her second thoughts. With that mood, that touch of arriere pensee, went an uncertain, speaking set of lips.

Elizabeth Bowen
My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without — a so-called normal relation to society. My books are my relation to society.

Elizabeth Bowen
Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?

Elizabeth Bowen
The sky hung over the valley, from hill to hill, like a slack white sheet.

Elizabeth Bowen
I am fully intelligent only when I write. I have a certain amount of small-change intelligence, which I carry round with me as, at any rate in a town, one has to carry small money, for the needs of the day, the non-writing day. But it seems to me I seldom purely think... if I thought more I might write less.

Elizabeth Bowen