Quotes By Elizabeth Bowen
That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
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
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
Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
Elizabeth Bowen
Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
Elizabeth Bowen
The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.
Elizabeth Bowen
Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.
Elizabeth Bowen
Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
Elizabeth Bowen
Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
Elizabeth Bowen
All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
Elizabeth Bowen
The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.
Elizabeth Bowen