Elizabeth Bowen

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Writers do not find subjects; subjects find them.

— Elizabeth Bowen

nothing is more restful than conformity.

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

Autumn arrives in the early morning.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Silences can be as different as sounds.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Disappointment tears the bearable film off life.

— Elizabeth Bowen

The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.

— Elizabeth Bowen

In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.

— Elizabeth Bowen

“You must show him your monkey: I am sure he will like that.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.

— Elizabeth Bowen

The silence of a shut park does not sound like the country silence; it is tense and confined.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave…

— Elizabeth Bowen

A Bowen, in the first place, made Bowen's Court. Since then, with a rather alarming sureness, Bowen's Court has made all the…

— Elizabeth Bowen

I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experiences, and that the most powerful of my memories are only…

— Elizabeth Bowen

Every love has a poetic relevance of its own; each love brings to light only what to it is relevant. Outside lies…

— Elizabeth Bowen

“But there's no end to what's been said, and I'll be a party to nothing. I was born with my mouth shut:those…

— Elizabeth Bowen

“By habit, she looked round the room she sat in. Anything she could do to it had been done; what it could…

— Elizabeth Bowen

My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without - a so-called normal…

— Elizabeth Bowen

Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Dialogue is the ideal means of showing what is between the characters. It crystallizes relationships. It should, ideally, be so effective as…

— Elizabeth Bowen

What must novel dialogue . . . really be and do? It must be pointed, intentional, relevant. It must crystallize situation. It…

— Elizabeth Bowen

Ghosts, we hope, may be always with us - that is, never too far out of the reach of fancy. On the…

— Elizabeth Bowen

“I don't know what's come over this place,' Maud stated. 'However, the Lord did, so in despair He showed me what I…

— Elizabeth Bowen

whenever possible I avoid talking. Reprieve from talking is my idea of a holiday. At risk of seeming unsociable, which I am,…

— Elizabeth Bowen

Nothing, that is say no one, can be such an inexorable tour-conductor as one's own conscience or sense of duty, if one…

— Elizabeth Bowen

Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant; impossible socially, but full scale; and it's the knockings…

— Elizabeth Bowen

Memory must be patchy; what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out - unique to…

— Elizabeth Bowen

Dress has never been at all a straightforward business: so much subterranean interest and complex feeling attaches to it. As a topic…

— Elizabeth Bowen

Knowledge of Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain through the thinning shoe-leather. ... When it…

— Elizabeth Bowen

“Innocence so constantly finds itself in a false position that inwardly innocent people learn to be disingenuous. Finding no language in which…

— Elizabeth Bowen

“The restaurant was waning, indifferently relaxing its illusion: for the late-comers a private illusion took its place. Their table seemed to stand…

— Elizabeth Bowen

I am dead against art's being self-expression. I see an inherent failure in any story which fails to detach itself from the…

— Elizabeth Bowen

Mr. [Aldous] Huxley has been the alarming young man for a long time, a sort of perpetual clever nephew who can be…

— Elizabeth Bowen

What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to…

— Elizabeth Bowen

“The beautiful agonising mirage of the university was inescapable from. This was a forever she had no part in. The eternity was…

— Elizabeth Bowen