34 Quotes by Elizabeth Bowen
- Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
- Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.
- One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
- That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
- Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.
- No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
- Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
- The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.
- The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
- Who is ever adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't.
- Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.
- 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.
- There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.
- We are minor in everything but our passions.
- When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.
- Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.
- The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.
- Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
- Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.
- All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
- Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
- Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.
- Education is not so important as people think.
- I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.
- I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.
- If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.
- Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
- Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.
- Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
- Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
- Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
- It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
- Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
- Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
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