Top 180 Elizabeth Bowen Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “Memory must be patchy; what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out – unique to oneself, one’s own, one’s claim to identity, it implicates one’s identity in its fibbing.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

53. “Expectations are the most perilous form of dream, and when dreams do realise themselves it is in the waking world: the difference is subtly but often painfully felt.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

54. “It is in this unearthly first hour of spring twilight that earth’s almost agonized livingness is most felt. This hour is so dreadful to some people that they hurry indoors and turn on the lights.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

55. “Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

56. “Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer’s take-down of a ‘real life’ conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In ‘real life’ everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

57. “The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

58. “Dialogue should convey a sense of spontaneity but eliminate the repetitiveness of real talk.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

59. “By the rules of fiction, with which life to be credible must comply, he was as a character “impossible” – each time they met, for instance, he showed no shred or trace of having been continuous since they last met.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

60. “To the sun Rome owes its underlying glow, and its air called golden – to me, more the yellow of white wine; like wine it raises agreeability to poetry.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

61. “Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?”

— Elizabeth Bowen

62. “When one is a child, the disposition of objects, tables and chairs and doors, seems part of the natural order: a house-move lets in chaos – as it does for a dog.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

63. “On the subject of dress almost no one, for one or another reason, feels truly indifferent: if their own clothes do not concern them, somebody else’s do.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

64. “Dialogue should show the relationships among people.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

65. “Short of a small range of physical acts-a fight, murder, lovemaking-dialogue is the most vigorous and visible inter-action of which characters in a novel are capable. Speech is what characters do to each other.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

66. “The inside of the house – with its shallow door-panels, lozenge door-knobs, polished brass ball on the end of the banisters, stuffy red matt paper with stripes to artfully shadowed as to appear bars – was more than simply novel to Henrietta, it was antagonistic, as though it had been invented to put her out. She felt the house was acting, nothing seemed to be natural; objects did not wait to be seen but came crowding in on her, each with what amounted to its aggressive cry.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

67. “The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance – due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author’s attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful – and possibly the only – help that can be given.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

68. “Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

69. “Roughly, the action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown. In the first half of a novel, the unpredictability should be the more striking. In the second half, the inevitability should be the more striking.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

70. “Style is the thing that’s always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

73. “First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences, gestures, attitudes, a burning phrase with no context.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

74. “Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

75. “The story must spring from an impression or perception pressing enough to have made the writer write. It should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

76. “Dogs are a habit, I think.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

77. “Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

78. “With three or more people there is something bold in the air: direct things get said which would frighten two people alone and conscious of each inch of their nearness to one another. To be three is to be in public – you feel safe.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

79. “Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

80. “My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without – a so-called normal relation to society. My books are my relation to society.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

81. “Every love has a poetic relevance of its own; each love brings to light only what to it is relevant. Outside lies the junk-yard of what does not matter.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

82. “I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experiences, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

83. “Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant; impossible socially, but full scale; and it’s the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

84. “Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

85. “I suspect victims; they win in the long run.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

86. “Dialogue is the ideal means of showing what is between the characters. It crystallizes relationships. It should, ideally, be so effective as to make analysis or explanation of the relationships between the characters unnecessary.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

87. “Good-byes breed a sort of distaste for whomever you say good-bye to; this hurts, you feel, this must not happen again.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

88. “Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

89. “While I stand and regard it, the indifference to myself shown by a work of art in itself is art.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

90. “With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

91. “Wariness had driven away poetry; from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

92. “The belt slid down her thin hips, and she nervously gripped at it, pulling it up. Short sleeves showed her very thin arms and big delicate elbow joints. Her body was all concave and jerkily fluid lines; it moved with sensitive looseness, loosely threaded together: each movement had a touch of exaggeration, as though some secret power kept springing out.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

93. “I can’t see or feel the conflict between love and religion. To me, they’re the same thing.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

94. “For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realisation is something of an ordeal. Expectations are the most perilous form of dream, and when dreams do realise themselves it is in the waking world: the difference is subtly but often painfully felt.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

95. “Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

96. “I do like Italian graves; they look so much more lived in.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

98. “Revenge was a very wild kind of justice...”

— Elizabeth Bowen

99. “Bring all your intelligence to bear on your beginning.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

100. “Princess Bibesco delighted in a semi-ideal world – a world which, though having a counterpart in her experience, was to a great extent brought into being by her own temperament and, one might say, flair.”

— Elizabeth Bowen