Elizabeth Bowen - People Quotes

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It is in this unearthly first hour of spring twilight that earth's almost agonized livingness is most felt. This hour is so dreadful to some people that they hurry indoors and turn on the lights.

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

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

Elizabeth Bowen
Also, perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all.

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

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
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
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
Very young people are true but not resounding instruments.

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

Elizabeth Bowen
The Irish landowner, partly from laziness but also from an indifferent delicacy, does not interfere in the lives of the people round. Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland, but these cannot operate the whole time: on the whole, the landowner leaves his tenants and work-people to make their own mistakes, while he makes his.

Elizabeth Bowen
But complex people are never certain that they are not crooks, never certain their passports are quite in order, and are, therefore, unnerved by the slightest thing.

Elizabeth Bowen
Grown-up people seem to be busy by clockwork: even when someone is not ill, when there has been no telegram, they run their unswerving course from object to object, directed by some mysterious inner needle that points all the time to what they must do next. You can only marvel at such misuse of time.

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

Elizabeth Bowen
Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable.

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

Elizabeth Bowen
Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.

Elizabeth Bowen
For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal. Expectations are the most perilous form of dream, and when dreams do realize themselves it is in the waking world: the difference is subtly but often painfully felt.

Elizabeth Bowen
With three or more people there is something bold in the air: direct things get said which would frighten two people alone and conscious of each inch of their nearness to one another. To be three is to be in public - you feel safe.

Elizabeth Bowen