Quotes By Elizabeth Bowen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

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

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

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.

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

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

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

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

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

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

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Education is not so important as people think.

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

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.

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

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