Top 180 Elizabeth Bowen Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Leopold was not even interested in hurting, and was only tweaking her petals off or her wings off with the intention of exploring himself. His dispassionateness was more dire, to Henrietta, than cruelty. 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

102. “Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

103. “Raids are slightly constipating.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

104. “Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland...”

— Elizabeth Bowen

105. “All the days that go by only make me seem to be getting further and further away from the day I last saw Eddie, not nearer and nearer the day I shall see him again.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

106. “Silences can be as different as sounds.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

107. “In big houses in which things are done properly, there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

108. “Sins cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

109. “A smell of sandalwood boxes, a kind of glaze on the air from all the chintzes numbed his earthy vitality, he became all ribs and uniform.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

110. “The passion of vanity has its own depths in the spirit, and is powerfully militant.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

111. “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

112. “You never quite know when you may hope to repair the damage done by going away.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

113. “Jane Austen, much in advance of her day, was a mistress of the use of the dialogue. She used it as dialogue should be used-to advance the story; not only to show the characters, but to advance.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

114. “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. This isolation, young love and hero worship accomplish without remorse; they hardly know tenderness.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

115. “Sacrificers are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those they sacrifice.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

116. “Makes of men date, like makes of car.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

117. “What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

118. “Silence sat in the taxi, as though a stranger had got in.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

119. “Ever since that evening when you gave me my hat, I’ve been as true to you as I’ve got it in me to be. Don’t force me to where untruth starts. You say nothing would make you hate me. But once make me hate myself and you’d make me hate you.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

120. “Solitary and farouche people don’t have relationships; they are quite unrelatable.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

121. “The way downhill, into the bottomless incredulity which is despair, was incandescent with flowering chestnut trees.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

122. “She was in that flagging mood when to go on living seems only to load more unmeaning moments on to your memory.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

123. “All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

124. “People in love, in whom every sense is open, cannot beat off the influence of a place.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

125. “Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market – you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane; another won’t get over the right stile...”

— Elizabeth Bowen

126. “Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?”

— Elizabeth Bowen

127. “Spoilt pleasure is a sad, unseemly thing; you can only bury it.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

128. “Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone the pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude. She had never landed at Cork, so this hill and that hill beyond were as unexpected as pictures at which you say “Oh look!” Nobody was beside her to share the moment, which would have been imperfect with anyone else there.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

129. “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...”

— Elizabeth Bowen

130. “The paradox of romantic love – that what one possesses, one can no longer desire – was at work.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

131. “Young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate; they like to have loud chords struck on them.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

132. “Grown-up people seem to be busy by clockwork: even when someone is not ill, when there has been no telegram, they run their unswerving course from object to object, directed by some mysterious inner needle that points all the time to what they must do next. You can only marvel at such misuse of time.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

133. “But surely love wouldn’t get so much talked about if there were not something in it?”

— Elizabeth Bowen

134. “Meetings that do not come off keep a character of their own. They stay as they were projected.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

135. “Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one’s outlook; it only confirms one’s idea that one is unique.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

136. “When I read a story, I relive the moment from which it sprang. A scene burned itself into me, a building magnetized me, a mood orseason of Nature’s penetrated me, history suddenly appeared to me in some tiny act, or a face had begun to haunt me before I glanced at it.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

137. “Some ideas, like dandelions in lawns, strike tenaciously: you may pull off the top but the root remains, drives down suckers and may even sprout again.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

138. “At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial games could be played.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

139. “One’s sentiments – call them that – one’s fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: only when they are betrayed or, worse still, when one betrays them does one realize their power.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

140. “People must hope so much when they tear streets up and fight at barricades. But, whoever wins, the streets are laid again and the trams start running again. One hopes too much of destroying things. If revolutions do not fail, they fail you.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

141. “And because no one answered or cared and a conversation went on without her she felt profoundly lonely, suspecting once more for herself a particular doom of exclusion. Something of the trees in their intimacy of shadow was shared by the husband and wife and their host in the tree-shadowed room. She thought of love with its gift of importance. “I must break in on all this,” she thought as she looked around the room.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

142. “Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft...”

— Elizabeth Bowen

143. “Their hands, swinging, touched lightly now and then; their nearness was as natural as the June day.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

144. “Certain books come to meet me, as do people.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

145. “But complex people are never certain that they are not crooks, never certain their passports are quite in order, and are, therefore, unnerved by the slightest thing.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

146. “You could see that her tremendous inside life, its solitary fears and fires, was out of accord with her humble view of herself; to hide or excuse what she felt was her first wish.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

147. “Forgiveness should be an act, but this is a state with him.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

148. “The way one is envisaged by other people – what easier way is there of envisaging oneself? There is a fatalism in one’s acceptance of it. Solitude is not the solution, one feels followed. Choice – choice of those who are to surround one, choice of those most likely to see you rightly – is the only escape.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

149. “What is being said is the effect of something that has happened; at the same time, what is being said is in itself something happening, which will, in turn, leave its effect.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

150. “Look, let’s see ourselves in the distance, then we shall think, how happy they are! We’re young; this is spring; this is a wood. In some sort of way or other we love each other, and our lives are before us – God pity us! Do you hear the birds?”

— Elizabeth Bowen