Quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

• Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
• 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.
• If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.