Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

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
Autumn arrives in the early morning but spring at the close of a winter's day.
Elizabeth Bowen
Experience isn't interesting till it begins to repeat itself-in fact till it does that it hardly is experience.
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
For people who live on expectations to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.
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
If you look at life one way there is always cause for alarm.
Elizabeth Bowen
Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
Elizabeth Bowen
Habit is not mere subjugation it is a tender tie when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.
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
For people who live on expectations to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.
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
If you look at life one way there is always cause for alarm.
Elizabeth Bowen
Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
Elizabeth Bowen
Habit is not mere subjugation it is a tender tie when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.
Elizabeth Bowen
Some people are molded by their admirations others by their hostilities.
Elizabeth Bowen
Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
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
Silences have a climax when you have got to speak.
Elizabeth Bowen
All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted when you find it taken for granted you are unnerved.
Elizabeth Bowen
No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
Elizabeth Bowen
When you love someone all your saved-up wishes start coming out.
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
Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
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
Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
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
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
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
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
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
She posed as being more indolent than she felt, for fear of finding herself less able than she could wish.
Elizabeth Bowen
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
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
Livvy noted there seemed some communal feeling between the married: any wife could be faintly rude to anyone else's husband.
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
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