Elizabeth Bowen's Quotes

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

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

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

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

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

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

Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.

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

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

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.

There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

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.

When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.

We are minor in everything but our passions.

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.

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

The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.

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

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

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.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.

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

Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.