Elizabeth Bowen - Quotes

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye. ---->>>

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

Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat. ---->>>

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

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

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

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

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain. ---->>>

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

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

The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved is part of one's self-respect. ---->>>

It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets. ---->>>

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

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

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. ---->>>

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

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

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

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation. ---->>>

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

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

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

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

The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better. ---->>>

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

There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone. ---->>>

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

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

Education is not so important as people think. ---->>>

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