Elizabeth Bowen Quotes
It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
somehow at parties at which one stays standing up one seems to require to be more concentratedly intelligent than one does at those at which one can sit down.
Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
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.
No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.
Jane Austen, much in advance of her day, was a mistress of the use of the dialogue. She used it as dialogue should be used-to advance the story; not only to show the characters, but to advance.
Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
A romantic man often feels more uplifted with two women than with one: his love seems to hit the ideal mark somewhere between two different faces.
She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her.
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.
But complex people are never certain that they are not crooks, never certain their passports are quite in order, and are, therefore, unnerved by the slightest thing.
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.
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.
The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.
The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.
Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.
All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
What is being said is the effect of something that has happened; at the same time, what is being said is in itself something happening, which will, in turn, leave its effect.
What's the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually - our sense of personality is a sense of outrage.
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 story must spring from an impression or perception pressing enough to have made the writer write. It should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure.
Dialogue should convey a sense of spontaneity but eliminate the repetitiveness of real talk.
