Top 180 Elizabeth Bowen Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

2. “A living dog’s better than a dead lion.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

3. “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

Featured in: Romance Quotes

4. “To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

5. “Education is not so important as people think.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

6. “Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

7. “Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

9. “The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

10. “It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

11. “Autumn arrives in the early morning.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

12. “Childish fantasy, like the sheath over the bud, not only protects but curbs the terrible budding spirit, protects not only innocence from the world, but the world from the power of innocence.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

13. “The craft of the novelist does lie first of all in story-telling.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

14. “Rich women live at such a distance from life that very often they never see their money – the Queen, they say, for instance, never carries a purse.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

15. “The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

17. “Nobody speaks the truth when there’s something they must have.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

18. “Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

19. “I pity people who do not care for Society. They are poorer for the oblation they do not make.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

20. “Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

21. “A Bowen, in the first place, made Bowen’s Court. Since then, with a rather alarming sureness, Bowen’s Court has made all the succeeding Bowens.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

22. “Love of privacy – perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society – has become in many people almost pathological.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

23. “Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

24. “The silence of a shut park does not sound like the country silence; it is tense and confined.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

25. “No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

26. “We have really no absent friends.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

27. “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.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

28. “Often when I write I am trying to make words do the work of line and color. I have the painter’s sensitivity to light. Much of my writing is verbal painting.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

29. “Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

30. “We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

31. “Solitary and farouche people don’t have relationships; they are quite unrelatable. If you and I were capable of being altogether house-trained and made jolly, we should be nicer people, but not writers.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

33. “Don’t you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same...”

— Elizabeth Bowen

34. “Disappointment tears the bearable film of life.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

35. “Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

36. “Darling, I don’t want you; I’ve got no place for you; I only want what you give. I don’t want the whole of anyone. I haven’t wanted to hurt you; I haven’t wanted to touch you in any way. When I try and show you the truth I fill you with such despair. Life is so much more impossible than you think.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

39. “There is no doubt that sorrow brings one down in the world. The aristocratic privilege of silence belongs, you soon find out, to only the happy state- or, at least, to the state when pain keeps within bounds.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

40. “All my life I have said, “Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs” – and what a mistake.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

41. “Plot is the knowing of destination.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

42. “The novelist’s – any writer’s – object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

43. “For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

44. “History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts; it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called ‘eternal.’ What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

45. “Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One’s relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

46. “After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

47. “I think the main thing, don’t you, is to keep the show on the road.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

48. “Ghosts seem harder to please than we are; it is as though they haunted for haunting’s sake – much as we relive, brood, and smoulder over our pasts.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

49. “In ‘real life’ everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

50. “Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie; when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.”

— Elizabeth Bowen