Elizabeth Bowen - The House in Paris (1926)

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Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.

Elizabeth Bowen
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
All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.

Elizabeth Bowen
And yet in a way I would rather fail point blank. Things one can do have no value. I don't mind feeling small myself, but I dread finding the world is.

Elizabeth Bowen
Young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate; they like to have loud chords struck on them.

Elizabeth Bowen
Going to meet a stranger or semi-stranger, can you help asking yourself what they are coming to meet?

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
To leap is not only to leap, it is to hit the ground somewhere.

Elizabeth Bowen
Forgiveness should be an act, but this is a state with him.

Elizabeth Bowen
He diagnosed her as prey to one creeping growth, the Past, septic with what had happened.

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
Goodbyes breed a sort of distaste for whomever you say goodbye to; this hurts, you feel; this must not happen again.

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

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

Elizabeth Bowen
Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?

Elizabeth Bowen
Silence sat in the taxi, as though a stranger had got in.

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

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
She stayed bound to a gone moment, like a stopped clock with hands silently pointing an hour it cannot be.

Elizabeth Bowen
There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

Elizabeth Bowen
Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone the pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude. She had never landed at Cork, so this hill and that hill beyond were as unexpected as pictures at which you say "Oh look!" Nobody was beside her to share the moment, which would have been imperfect with anyone else there.

Elizabeth Bowen
She seemed to lie less in weakness than in unwilling credulity as though the successive disasters that make an illness had convinced her slowly, by repetition.

Elizabeth Bowen
Meetings that do not come off keep a character of their own. They stay as they were projected.

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

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

Elizabeth Bowen
Her illness seemed to be one prolonged mistake. Her self looked, wildly smiling, out of her body: what was happening in here was too terrible to acknowledge; she had to travesty it and laugh it off. Unserene, she desperately kept her head.

Elizabeth Bowen
There must be something she wanted; and that therefore she was no lady.

Elizabeth Bowen
That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

Elizabeth Bowen
No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

Elizabeth Bowen