Quotes By Elizabeth Bowen

Education is not so important as people think.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

We are minor in everything but our passions.

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.

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

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

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.

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 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.

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.

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.