Elizabeth Bowen Quotes
Elizabeth Bowen Quotes
- 1
All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 2
Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 3
Art is the only thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 4
Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 5
Education is not so important as people think.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 6
Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 7
Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 8
Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 9
I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 10
I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 11
If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 12
If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 13
Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 14
Intimacies between women go backwards, beginning with revelations and ending up in small talk without loss of esteem.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 15
Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk without loss of esteem.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 16
Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 17
Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 18
It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 19
Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 20
Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 21
Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 22
Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 23
Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 24
No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 25
Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 26
Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 27
Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 28
One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 29
Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 30
Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 31
That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 32
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.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 33
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 34
The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 35
The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 36
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.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 37
There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 38
We are minor in everything but our passions.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 39
When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
- 40
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.
Elizabeth Bowen | top
