Elizabeth Bowen Quotes
Elizabeth Bowen provides thoughtful, nuanced thoughts on change and friendship, appealing to readers who appreciate subtle insight.
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'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 and we'll never get outside of it.' But the hold of the country was that, she considered, it could be thought of in terms of oneself, so interpreted.
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Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.
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This is the worst of love, this unmeant mystification - someone smiling and going out without saying where, or a letter arriving, being read in your presence, put away, not explained, or: 'No, alas, I can't to-night' on the telephone - that, one person having set up without knowing, the other cannot undo without the where? who? why? that brings them both down a peg. Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
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And yet in a way I would rather fail point blank. Things one can do have no value. I don't mind feeling small myself, but I dread finding the world is.
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It is a wary business, walking about a strange house you are to know well. Only cats and dogs with their more expressive bodies enact the tension we share with them at such times. The you inside you gathers up defensively: something is stealing upon you every moment; you will never be quite the same again. These new unsmiling lights, reflections and objects are to become your memories, riveted to you closer than friends or lovers, going with you, even, into the grave: worse, they may become dear and fasten like so many leeches on your heart.
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Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.
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Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk, without loss of esteem.
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when you love someone, all your saved-up wishes start coming out
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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.
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To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.
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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.
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Convention was our safeguard: could one have stronger?
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to leap is not only to leap, it is to hit the ground somewhere.
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That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
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Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
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rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate - it slid and melted away.
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Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable.
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The silence of a shut park does not sound like the country silence; it is tense and confined.
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one should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.
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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.
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Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.
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It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.
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Every love has a poetic relevance of its own; each love brings to light only what to it is relevant. Outside lies the junk-yard of what does not matter.
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without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold.