Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

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.

Livvy noted there seemed some communal feeling between the married: any wife could be faintly rude to anyone else's husband.

She posed as being more indolent than she felt, for fear of finding herself less able than she could wish.

Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone her pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude.

Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates it's own objects: is this not also true of fear?

When you love someone all your saved-up wishes start coming out.

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

Silences have a climax when you have got to speak.

Some people are molded by their admirations others by their hostilities.

Habit is not mere subjugation it is a tender tie when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.

If you look at life one way there is always cause for alarm.

Who ever is adequate? We all create situations which others can't live up to then break our hearts at them because they don't.

For people who live on expectations to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.

Experience isn't interesting till it begins to repeat itself-in fact till it does that it hardly is experience.

Autumn arrives in the early morning but spring at the close of a winter's day.

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.

Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.