All my life I have said, "Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs"--and what a mistake. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
Expectations are the most perilous form of dream, and when dreams do realise themselves it is in the waking world: the difference… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
Almost everybody wore a curious limpidity of expression, like newborn babies or souls just after death. Dazed but curiously dignified.... after a… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
Ghosts, we hope, may be always with us - that is, never too far out of the reach of fancy. On the… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden,… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
Childish fantasy, like the sheath over the bud, not only protects but curbs the terrible budding spirit, protects not only innocence from… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
Princess Bibesco delighted in a semi-ideal world - a world which, though having a counterpart in her experience, was to a great… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
There is no doubt that sorrow brings one down in the world. The aristocratic privilege of silence belongs, you soon find out,… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain. — 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 Image
“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 Image
It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home. — 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 the junk-yard… — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people. — Elizabeth Bowen Copy Share Image
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 Image
“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 Image
