Quotes By Elizabeth Bowen

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

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

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

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

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.

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.

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

Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.

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

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

Education is not so important as people think.

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

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.

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.

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

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

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

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

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

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

We are minor in everything but our passions.

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

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

If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.

Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.

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

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

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