Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

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

If they should only be ill,' she said, 'there would be so many little things we could do for them. It does seem in a kind of a way an opportunity. I often think it is only when a man is ill that he understands what a woman means in his life.

~ Elizabeth Bowen

Livvy noted there seemed some communal feeling between the married: any wife could be faintly rude to anyone else's husband.

~ Elizabeth Bowen

Writers do not find subjects, subjects find them.

~ Elizabeth Bowen

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

She posed as being more indolent than she felt, for fear of finding herself less able than she could wish.

~ Elizabeth Bowen

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.... What you want is the whole of me-isn't it, isn't it?-and the whole of me isn't there for anybody. In that full sense you want me I don't exist.

~ Elizabeth Bowen

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

Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone her pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude.

~ Elizabeth Bowen

I swear that each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant - impossible socially, but full-scale - and that it's the knockings and baterrings we sometimes hear in each other that keeps our intercourse from utter banaility.

~ Elizabeth Bowen

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

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

~ Elizabeth Bowen

He specialized in a particular kind of friendship with that eight-limbed, inscrutable, treacherous creature, the happily married coupe, adapting himself closely and lightly to the composite personality.A peevish dead woman...it's absurd...how much less humiliating for them both it would have been if she had taken a lover.

~ Elizabeth Bowen

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

~ Elizabeth Bowen

Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates it's own objects: is this not also true of fear?

~ Elizabeth Bowen

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

~ Elizabeth Bowen

Silences have a climax when you have got to speak.

~ Elizabeth Bowen

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

Each of us keeps battened down inside himself a sort of lunatic giant -impossible socially but full-scale. It's the knockings and batterings we sometimes hear in each other that keep our intercourse from utter banality.

~ Elizabeth Bowen

Habit is not mere subjugation it is a tender tie when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.

~ Elizabeth Bowen

Who ever is adequate? We all create situations which others can't live up to then break our hearts at them because they don't.

~ Elizabeth Bowen

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

~ Elizabeth Bowen

Experience isn't interesting till it begins to repeat itself-in fact till it does that it hardly is experience.

~ Elizabeth Bowen

When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.

~ Elizabeth Bowen

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

~ Elizabeth Bowen

Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.

~ Elizabeth Bowen

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

~ Elizabeth Bowen

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

~ Elizabeth Bowen

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

~ Elizabeth Bowen