Fiction Quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

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

“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

It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold.

— 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,…

— 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, the daily…

— Elizabeth Bowen

To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.

— 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 one's self-respect.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Convention was our safeguard: could one have stronger?

— Elizabeth Bowen

“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

to leap is not only to leap, it is to hit the ground somewhere.

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

“But Miss Pym gave an impression, somehow, of having been attacked from within .”

— Elizabeth Bowen

rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate - it slid and melted away.

— Elizabeth Bowen