Elizabeth Bowen

I can't see or feel the conflict between love and religion. To me, they're the same thing.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Good-byes breed a sort of distaste for whomever you say good-bye to; this hurts, you feel, this must not happen again.

— Elizabeth Bowen

life is a succession of readjustments.

— Elizabeth Bowen

This, my first [bicycle] had an intrinsic beauty. And it opened for me an era of all but flying, which roads emptily…

— Elizabeth Bowen

Bring all your intelligence to bear on your beginning.

— Elizabeth Bowen

“As for Thomas, the longer he lived, the less he cared for the world.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

“the senses bound our feeling world: there is an abrupt break where their power stops”

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

There's something so showy about desperation, it takes hard wits to see it's a grandiose form of funk.

— Elizabeth Bowen

“Spezia offered Leopold almost nothing: his precocity devoured itself there, rejecting the steep sunny coast and nibbling blue edge of the sea…

— Elizabeth Bowen

Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie; when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.

— 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

The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a…

— Elizabeth Bowen

Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland ...

— Elizabeth Bowen

... in general, the Anglo-Irish do not make good dancers; they are too spritely and conscious; they are incapable of one kind…

— 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

Spoilt pleasure is a sad, unseemly thing; you can only bury it.

— Elizabeth Bowen

As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another…

— Elizabeth Bowen

The writer, unlike his non-writing adult friend, has no predisposed outlook; he seldom observes deliberately. He sees what he didnot intend to…

— Elizabeth Bowen

Grown-up people seem to be busy by clockwork... They run their unswerving course from object to object, directed by some mysterious inner…

— Elizabeth Bowen

Also, perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all.

— Elizabeth Bowen

With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of…

— Elizabeth Bowen