Words matter. These are the best Elizabeth Bowen Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one’s outlook; it only confirms one’s idea that one is unique.
If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.
I became, and remain, my characters’ close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.
When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.
Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
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.
Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.
Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
Education is not so important as people think.
It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet – when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.
Experience isn’t interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.
Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
That is partly why women marry – to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
We are minor in everything but our passions.
Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.
There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.
Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
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.
Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.
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.
Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
