Elizabeth Bowen - The Heat of the Day (1948)

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Don't you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same.

Elizabeth Bowen
Louie had, with regard to time, an infant lack of stereoscopic vision; she saw then and now on the same plane; they were the same. To her everything seemed to be going on at once; so that she deferred, when she did, in a trouble of half-belief to either the calendar or the clock.

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

Elizabeth Bowen
Wariness had driven away poetry; from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could.

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
In my experience one thing you don't learn from is anything anyone set up to be a lesson; what you are to know you pick up as you go along.

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
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
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
One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.

Elizabeth Bowen