C. Elizabeth Quotes

Insomnia" perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.

Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)

Anger is the poorest of counselors, and revenge is suicide.

The Sound of battle fell upon my ear & heart all day yesterday - even after dark the cannon's insatiate roar continued.

Surely tis by faith we are upheld thro such trials-justice will be meted in time to those who fill soft places and malign men who perform heroic duties

The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.

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

life is a succession of readjustments.

Convention was our safeguard: could one have stronger?

When one is a child, the disposition of objects, tables and chairs and doors, seems part of the natural order: a house-move lets in chaos - as it does for a dog.

Two things are terrible in childhood: helplessness (being in other people's power) and apprehension - the apprehension that something is being concealed from us because it is too bad to be told.

A Bowen, in the first place, made Bowen's Court. Since then, with a rather alarming sureness, Bowen's Court has made all the succeeding Bowens.

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.

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

Sacrificers are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those they sacrifice.

To the sun Rome owes its underlying glow, and its air called golden - to me, more the yellow of white wine; like wine it raises agreeability to poetry.

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

... it appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy, little is quite impossible.

It is in this unearthly first hour of spring twilight that earth's almost agonized livingness is most felt. This hour is so dreadful to some people that they hurry indoors and turn on the lights.

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.

children like change - for one thing, they never anticipate regret.

Expectations are the most perilous form of dream, and when dreams do realise themselves it is in the waking world: the difference is subtly but often painfully felt.

fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.

Education is not so important as people think.

Have not all poetic truths been already stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be final.

On the subject of dress almost no one, for one or another reason, feels truly indifferent: if their own clothes do not concern them, somebody else's do.

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

The passion of vanity has its own depths in the spirit, and is powerfully militant.

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.

Almost everyone admits to hunger during the Opera.... Hunger is so exalting that during a last act you practically levitate.

... artists were intended to be an ornament to society. As a society in themselves they are unthinkable.

All my life I have said, "Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs"--and what a mistake.

At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial games could be played.

I pity people who do not care for Society. They are poorer for the oblation they do not make.

Raids are slightly constipating.

Often when I write I am trying to make words do the work of line and color. I have the painter's sensitivity to light. Much of my writing is verbal painting.

Story involves action. Action towards an end not to be foreseen (by the reader) but also towards an end which, having been reached, must be seen to have been from the start inevitable.

But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it?

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

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

rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate - it slid and melted away.

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

Childish fantasy, like the sheath over the bud, not only protects but curbs the terrible budding spirit, protects not only innocence from the world, but the world from the power of innocence.

... love dreads being isolated, being left to speak in a void -- at the beginning it would often rather listen than speak.

[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.

... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.

the slight sense of degeneracy induced by reading novels before luncheon

Makes of men date, like makes of car.

Worrying about where to begin puts you in a fair way to waste your life worrying, without getting noticeably closer to beginning.

there are times when the one thing you haven't counts more than all the riches that may be yours.