Elizabeth Bowen quotes:

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

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

  • Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.

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

  • Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

  • Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

  • The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.

  • Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.

  • Almost everybody wore a curious limpidity of expression, like newborn babies or souls just after death. Dazed but curiously dignified.... after a criseof hysterical revulsion and tiredness, I passed beyondand became entered by a rather sublime feeling.

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

  • Good-byes breed a sort of distaste for whomever you say good-bye to; this hurts, you feel, this must not happen again.

  • It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.

  • Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.

  • 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.

  • Education is not so important as people think.

  • Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

  • 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.

  • History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts; it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called 'eternal.' What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.

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

  • She had one of those charming faces which, according to the angle from which you see them, look either melancholy or impertinent. Her eyes were grey; her trick of narrowing them made her seem to reflect, the greater part of the time, in the dusk of her second thoughts. With that mood, that touch of arriere pensee, went an uncertain, speaking set of lips.

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

  • There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

  • Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.

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

  • Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant; impossible socially, but full scale; and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.

  • Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.

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

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

  • The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.

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

  • 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.

  • First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences, gestures, attitudes, a burning phrase with no context.

  • Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.

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

  • One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.

  • The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.

  • The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance--due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author's attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful--and possibly the only--help that can be given.

  • the process of reading is reciprocal; the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.

  • We are minor in everything but our passions.

  • Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

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

  • ... it appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy, little is quite impossible.

  • As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.

  • Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?

  • Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little-even if one did once know what one meant

  • Dialogue should convey a sense of spontaneity but eliminate the repetitiveness of real talk.

  • Also, perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all.

  • The writer, unlike his non-writing adult friend, has no predisposed outlook; he seldom observes deliberately. He sees what he didnot intend to see; he remembers what does not seem wholly possible. Inattentive learner in the schoolroom of life, he keeps some faculty free to veer and wander. His is the roving eye.

  • Good-byes breed a sort of distaste for whomever you say good-bye to this hurts, you feel, this must not happen again

  • Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk without loss of esteem

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market - you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane; another won't get over the right stile ...

  • Silence sat in the taxi, as though a stranger had got in.

  • The Irish landowner, partly from laziness but also from an indifferent delicacy, does not interfere in the lives of the people round. Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland, but these cannot operate the whole time: on the whole, the landowner leaves his tenants and work-people to make their own mistakes, while he makes his.

  • The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart.

  • The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaited him--a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured--captured by some experience to which one may have given hardly a thought.

  • Nothing, that is say no one, can be such an inexorable tour-conductor as one's own conscience or sense of duty, if one allows either the upper hand: the self-bullying that goes on in the name of sight-seeing is grievous.

  • To the sun Rome owes its underlying glow, and its air called golden - to me, more the yellow of white wine; like wine it raises agreeability to poetry.

  • Sacrificers ... are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those that they sacrifice. Oh, the sacrificers, they get it both ways. A person knows themselves that they're able to do without.

  • Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.

  • If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.

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

  • Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.

  • That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

  • No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

  • 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.

  • Certain books come to meet me, as do people.

  • Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man.

  • 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.

  • Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.

  • Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.

  • It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.

  • 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.

  • I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.

  • The most steady, the most self-sufficient nature depends, more than it knows, on its few chosen stimuli.

  • What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.

  • I can't see or feel the conflict between love and religion. To me, they're the same thing.

  • Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.

  • one should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.

  • Dogs are a habit, I think.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.

  • 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.

  • With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

  • Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.

  • Young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate; they like to have loud chords struck on them.

  • My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without - a so-called normal relation to society. My books are my relation to society.

  • There's something so showy about desperation, it takes hard wits to see it's a grandiose form of funk.

  • To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.

  • Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.

  • I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

  • Ghosts seem harder to please than we are; it is as though they haunted for haunting's sake -- much as we relive, brood, and smoulder over our pasts.

  • Almost everyone admits to hunger during the Opera.... Hunger is so exalting that during a last act you practically levitate.

  • The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.

  • Raids are slightly constipating.

  • One can suffer a convulsion of one's entire nature, and, unless it makes some noise, no one notices. It's not just that we are incurious; we completely lack any sense of each other's existences.

  • Some ideas, like dandelions in lawns, strike tenaciously: you may pull off the top but the root remains, drives down suckers and may even sprout again.

  • 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 ...

  • People in love, in whom every sense is open, cannot beat off the influence of a place.

  • I pity people who do not care for Society. They are poorer for the oblation they do not make.

  • Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.

  • Spoilt pleasure is a sad, unseemly thing; you can only bury it.

  • ...the power-loving temperament is more dangerous when it either prefers or is forced to operate in what is materially a void. Wehave everything to dread from the dispossessed.

  • This, my first [bicycle] had an intrinsic beauty. And it opened for me an era of all but flying, which roads emptily crossing theairy, gold-gorsy Common enhanced. Nothing since has equalled that birdlike freedom.

  • A Bowen, in the first place, made Bowen's Court. Since then, with a rather alarming sureness, Bowen's Court has made all the succeeding Bowens.

  • nothing is more restful than conformity.

  • to leap is not only to leap, it is to hit the ground somewhere.

  • But in general, for the purposes of most novelists, the number of objects genuinely necessary for. . .describing a scene will be found to be very small.

  • I suspect victims; they win in the long run.

  • Convention was our safeguard: could one have stronger?

  • 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.

  • Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.

  • nobody ever dies of an indignity.

  • Expectations are the most perilous form of dream, and when dreams do realise themselves it is in the waking world: the difference is subtly but often painfully felt.

  • fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.

  • Wariness had driven away poetry; from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could.

  • Forgiveness should be an act, but this is a state with him.

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