Elizabeth Bowen - The Death of the Heart (1938)

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Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.

Elizabeth Bowen
It is about five o'clock in an evening that the first hour of spring strikes—autumn arrives in the early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.

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

Elizabeth Bowen
Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope, it is impossible.

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

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

Elizabeth Bowen
Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.

Elizabeth Bowen
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
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
The silence of a shut park does not sound like the country silence; it is tense and confined.

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
The finer the nature, and the higher the level at which it seeks to live, the lower in grief it not only sinks but dives.

Elizabeth Bowen
It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.

Elizabeth Bowen
What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.

Elizabeth Bowen
The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved is part of one's self-respect.

Elizabeth Bowen
I swear that each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant — impossible socially, but full-scale — and that it's the knockings and batterings we sometimes hear in each other that keeps our intercourse from utter banality.

Elizabeth Bowen
She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her.

Elizabeth Bowen
Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little-even if one did once know what one meant

Elizabeth Bowen
The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet—when they do, their victims lie strewn around.

Elizabeth Bowen
Often intimacies between women go backwards, beginning with revelations and ending up in small talk.

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

Elizabeth Bowen
Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself — in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.

Elizabeth Bowen
Sins cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life.

Elizabeth Bowen