Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

“A romantic man often feels more uplifted with two women than with one: his love seems to hit the ideal mark somewhere between two different faces.”

“But to be quite oneself one must first waste a little time.”

“When you love someone, all your saved-up wishes start coming out.”

“Writers do not find subjects; subjects find them.”

“Intimacies between women go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending up in small talk without loss of esteem.”

“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.”

“"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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“I am sick of the governessy attitude of our age, which is coming to be more genuinely presumptuous, nosier and more busybody than the Victorian.”

“It is thought that women inspire by their beauty; more often they do so by their longings.”

“[U]ntruths are thieves, robbing us of a birthright.”

“[T]here is a flaw in civilization from the instant it has to admit fear.”