Elizabeth Bowen
Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.Collection: Jealousy
When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.Collection: Valentines
Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.Collection: Truth
Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.Collection: Morning
Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.Collection: Women
Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.Collection: Art
One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.Collection: Imagination
No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.
Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.
Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.
Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
We are minor in everything but our passions.
It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.
Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.
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.
There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
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.
That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.
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.
I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.
I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.
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.
Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.
Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.
Education is not so important as people think.
Mr. [Aldous] Huxley has been the alarming young man for a long time, a sort of perpetual clever nephew who can be relied on to flutter the lunch party. Whatever will he say next? How does he think of those things? He has been deplored once or twice, but feeling is in his favor: he is steadily read. He is at once the truly clever person and the stupid person's idea of the clever person; he is expected to be relentless, to administer intellectual shocks.Collection: Clever
But to be quite oneself one must first waste a little time.Collection: Littles
Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.Collection: Character
In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.Collection: Real
Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.Collection: Life
Silences can be as different as sounds.Collection: Silence
life is a succession of readjustments.Collection: Change
The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.Collection: Doe
Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man.Collection: Men
memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Party
Spoilt pleasure is a sad, unseemly thing; you can only bury it.Collection: Pleasure
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.Collection: Growing Up