Elizabeth Bowen - Love Quotes

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

Elizabeth Bowen
Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.

Elizabeth Bowen
Love of privacy — perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society — has become in many people almost pathological.

Elizabeth Bowen
People in love, in whom every sense is open, cannot beat off the influence of a place.

Elizabeth Bowen
Whenever possible I avoid talking. Reprieve from talking is my idea of a holiday. At risk of seeming unsociable, which I am, I admit I love to be left in a beatific trance, when I am in one. Friendly Romans recognize that wish.

Elizabeth Bowen
The paradox of romantic love — that what one possesses, one can no longer desire — was at work.

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

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
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
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
Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects: is this not true of fear?

Elizabeth Bowen