Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear? — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it? — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
the slight sense of degeneracy induced by reading novels before luncheon — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
The paradox of romantic love -- that what one possesses, one can no longer desire -- was at work. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
“People in love, in whom every sense is open, cannot beat off the influence of a place.” — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
Every love has a poetic relevance of its own; each love brings to light only what to it is relevant. Outside lies… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
A romantic man often feels more uplifted with two women than with one: his love seems to hit the ideal mark somewhere… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them,… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
“Young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate; they like to… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
“And because no one answered or cared and a conversation went on without her she felt profoundly lonely, suspecting once more for… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
“First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
Love of privacy - perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society - has become in many people almost pathological. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
... love dreads being isolated, being left to speak in a void -- at the beginning it would often rather listen than speak. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
Sacrificers are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those they sacrifice. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
I can't see or feel the conflict between love and religion. To me, they're the same thing. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
“Are you really an orphan? Yes, I am, said Portia a shade shortly. Are you? No, not at present, but I suppose it's a… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
Every love has a poetic relevance of its own; each love brings to light only what to it is relevant. Outside lies the junk-yard… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
One's sentiments -- call them that -- one's fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: only when they are betrayed or,… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
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. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
“First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences,… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
“But Miss Pym gave an impression, somehow, of having been attacked from within .” — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate - it slid and melted away. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share
