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Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

Elizabeth Bowen, CBE was an Irish novelist and short story writer.

✵ 7. June 1899 – 22. February 1973  •  Other names الیزابت بون, إليزابيث بوين, الیزابت بوئن

Works

The Death of the Heart
The Death of the Heart
Elizabeth Bowen
The House in Paris
The House in Paris
Elizabeth Bowen
A World of Love
A World of Love
Elizabeth Bowen
The Death of the Heart
The Death of the Heart
Elizabeth Bowen
The House in Paris
The House in Paris
Elizabeth Bowen
A World of Love
A World of Love
Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen: 17 quotes0 likes

Famous Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

“She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her.”

Elizabeth Bowen book The Death of the Heart

Source: The Death of the Heart

“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.”

Elizabeth Bowen book The Death of the Heart

Source: The Death of the Heart

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

Elizabeth Bowen

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

Elizabeth Bowen book The Death of the Heart

Part 2, chapter 1 http://books.google.com/books?id=6DPQAAAAMAAJ&amp;q=%22intimacies+between+women+go+backwards+beginning+with+revelations+and+ending+up+in+small+talk+without+loss+of+esteem%22&amp;pg=PA172#v=onepage <br class="br">The Death of the Heart (1939)

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

“This is the worst of love, this unmeant mystification — someone smiling and going out without saying where, or a letter arriving, being read in your presence, put away, not explained, or: "No, alas, I can't to-night" on the telephone — that, one person having set up without knowing, the other cannot undo without the where? who? why? that brings them both down a peg. Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.”

Elizabeth Bowen book The House in Paris

The House in Paris (1935)

“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.”

Elizabeth Bowen book The House in Paris

The House in Paris (1935)

“"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.”

Elizabeth Bowen book The Last September

The Last September (1929)

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

Elizabeth Bowen book The Death of the Heart

The Death of the Heart (1939)

“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.”

Elizabeth Bowen book The House in Paris

The House in Paris (1935)

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

Elizabeth Bowen book The Death of the Heart

The Death of the Heart (1939)

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

Elizabeth Bowen book The House in Paris

The House in Paris (1935)

“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.”

Elizabeth Bowen

Source: A Time in Rome (1960), Ch. V, p. 141

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

Elizabeth Bowen

Source: A Time in Rome (1960), Ch. IV, p. 132

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

Elizabeth Bowen

Source: A Time in Rome (1960), Ch. II, p. 59

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

Elizabeth Bowen

Source: A Time in Rome (1960), Ch. I, p. 23

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