Top 180 Elizabeth Bowen Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “You and I are enough to break anyone’s heart – how can we not break our own?”

— Elizabeth Bowen

153. “By habit, she looked round the room she sat in. Anything she could do to it had been done; what it could do to her seemed without limit.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

154. “Also, perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

155. “The place gave out a look of hollow desuetude, as though its desertion would last forever.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

156. “The most steady, the most self-sufficient nature depends, more than it knows, on its few chosen stimuli.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

157. “Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little, even if one did once know what one meant.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

158. “Imagination of my kind is most caught, most fired, most worked upon by the unfamiliar: I have thrivenon the changes and chances, the dislocations andcontrasts which have made up so much of my life.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

159. “Convention was our safeguard: could one have stronger?”

— Elizabeth Bowen

160. “The happy passive nature, locked up with itself like a mirror in an airy room, reflects what goes on but demands not to be approached. A pact with life, a pact of immunity, appears to exist-But this pact is not respected for ever- a street accident, an overheard quarrel, a certain note in a voice, a face coming too close, a tree being blown down, someone’s unjust fate- the peace tears right across.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

161. “His experiences and hers became harder and harder to tell apart; everything gathered behind them into a common memory – though singly each of them might, must, exist, decide, act; all things done alone came to be no more than a simulcra of behaviour: they waited to live again till they were together... Every love has a poetic relevance of its own...”

— Elizabeth Bowen

162. “There’s something so showy about desperation, it takes hard wits to see it’s a grandiose form of funk.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

163. “It is a wary business, walking about a strange house you know you are to know well. Only cats and dogs with their more expressive bodies enact the tension we share with them at such times. The you inside gathers up defensively; something is stealing upon you every moment; you will never be the same again.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

164. “One can suffer a convulsion of one’s entire nature, and, unless it makes some noise, no one notices. It’s not just that we are incurious; we completely lack any sense of each other’s existences.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

165. “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 upon them. Loving art better than life they need men to be actors; only an actor moves them, with his telling smile, undomestic, out of touch with the everyday that they dread. They love to enjoy love as a system of doubts and shocks. They are right; not seeking husbands yet, they have no reason to see love socially.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

166. “No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life – the first twenty years of it – had about them something semi-fictitious.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

167. “I am much too influenced by people’s manner towards me – especially Anna’s I suppose. Directly people attack me, I think they are right, and hate myself, and then I hate them – the more I like them this is so.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

168. “Nothing, that is say no one, can be such an inexorable tour-conductor as one’s own conscience or sense of duty, if one allows either the upper hand: the self-bullying that goes on in the name of sight-seeing is grievous.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

169. “Though not all reading children grow up to be writers, I take it that most creative writers must in their day have been reading children.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

170. “Looking back at a repetition of empty days, one sees that monuments have sprung up. Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie: when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

171. “There must be perfect towns where shadows were strong like buildings, towns secret without coldness, unaware without indifference.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

172. “That Sunday, from six o’clock in the evening, it was a Viennese orchestra that played.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

173. “There are still places I cannot walk past, though we only walked here those two days. When I walk I look for places we did not go.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

174. “We observe small rites, but we defend ourselves against that terrible memory that is stronger than will. We defend ourselves from the rooms, the scenes, the objects that make for hallucination, that make the senses start up and fasten upon a ghost. We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

175. “Frantic smiles at parties, overtures that have desperation behind them, miasmic reaches of talk with the lost bore, short cuts to approach through staring, squeezing or kissing all indicate that one cannot live alone. Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

176. “You agonise me by being so agonised.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

177. “Experience isn’t interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

178. “I wonder where father’s gone. He repeatedly goes out but never comes in.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

179. “One does not go into the world and come home the same: isolation has altered its nature when one returns.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

180. “What’s in your mind, I suppose, is, why should you rise to occasions when I don’t? Let’s face it – who ever is adequate? We all create situations each other can’t live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don’t.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

181. “But I should never write what had happened down. One’s nature is to forget, and one ought to go by that. Memory is quite unbearable enough, but even so it leaves out quite a lot. It wouldn’t let one down as gently.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

182. “Did Anna also, sometimes not know what to do next? Because she knew what to do next, because she knew what to laugh at, what to say, did it always follow that she knew where to turn? Inside everyone, is there an anxious person who stands to hesitate in an empty room?”

— Elizabeth Bowen

183. “It’s not just that we are incurious; we completely lack any sense of each other’s existences.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

185. “There were readers who could expect no more from life, and just dared to look in books to see how much they had missed.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

186. “Society was self-interest given a pretty gloss.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

187. “If one didn’t let oneself swallow some few lies, I don’t know how one would ever carry the past.”

— Elizabeth Bowen