Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

Education is not so important as people think.

Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.

Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.

Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.

Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.