Elizabeth Bowen - Oneself Quotes

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Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.

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

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

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

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 nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.

Elizabeth Bowen