Elizabeth Bowen

... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the…

— Elizabeth Bowen

we can surmount the anger we feel. To find oneself like a young tree inside a tomb is to discover the power…

— Elizabeth Bowen

Love of privacy - perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society - has become in many people almost pathological.

— Elizabeth Bowen

... love dreads being isolated, being left to speak in a void -- at the beginning it would often rather listen than speak.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Some ideas, like dandelions in lawns, strike tenaciously: you may pull off the top but the root remains, drives down suckers and…

— Elizabeth Bowen

“A smell of sandalwood boxes, a kind of glaze on the air from all the chintzes numbed his earthy vitality, he became…

— Elizabeth Bowen

“Sacrificers,” said Matchett, “are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those that they sacrifice”

— Elizabeth Bowen

One's sentiments -- call them that -- one's fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: only when they are…

— Elizabeth Bowen

Characters should on the whole, be under rather than over articulate. What they intend to say should be more evident, more striking…

— Elizabeth Bowen

Roughly, the action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown. In the…

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk without loss of esteem

— Elizabeth Bowen

“Looking back at a repetition of empty days, one sees that monuments have sprung up. Habit is not mere subjugation, it is…

— Elizabeth Bowen

“She thought she need not worry about her youth; it wasted itself spontaneously, like sunshine elsewhere or firelight in an empty room.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

“You could see that her tremendous inside life, its solitary fears and fires, was out of accord with her humble view of…

— Elizabeth Bowen

Imagination of my kind is most caught, most fired, most worked upon by the unfamiliar: I have thrivenon the changes and chances,…

— Elizabeth Bowen

the process of reading is reciprocal; the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of…

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

“It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home. The need to attach themselves makes wandering…

— Elizabeth Bowen

every short story is an experiment - what one must ask is not only, did it come off, but was it, as…

— Elizabeth Bowen

It is in this unearthly first hour of spring twilight that earth's almost agonized livingness is most felt. This hour is so…

— Elizabeth Bowen

When one is a child, the disposition of objects, tables and chairs and doors, seems part of the natural order: a house-move…

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

The novelist's--any writer's--object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when…

— Elizabeth Bowen

Sacrificers ... are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those that they sacrifice. Oh, the sacrificers, they get…

— Elizabeth Bowen

The most steady, the most self-sufficient nature depends, more than it knows, on its few chosen stimuli.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Expectations are the most perilous form of dream, and when dreams do realise themselves it is in the waking world: the difference…

— Elizabeth Bowen

Who is ever adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they…

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

Have not all poetic truths been already stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be…

— Elizabeth Bowen

in my experience one thing you don't learn from is anything anyone set up to be a lesson; what you are to…

— Elizabeth Bowen

The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved is part of…

— Elizabeth Bowen

To the sun Rome owes its underlying glow, and its air called golden - to me, more the yellow of white wine;…

— Elizabeth Bowen