Quotes By Elizabeth Bowen

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.

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

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

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.

Education is not so important as people think.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

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

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.

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.

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