« All One Quotes · Elizabeth Bowen's Page
One Quotes by Elizabeth Bowen
- Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
- Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.
- If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
- 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.
- 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 seeing…
- One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
- Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie; when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.
- Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.
- What must novel dialogue . . . really be and do? It must be pointed, intentional, relevant. It must crystallize situation. It must express character.…
- One's sentiments -- call them that -- one's fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: only when they are betrayed or, worse…
- Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little-even if…
- The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaited him--a…
- On the subject of dress almost no one, for one or another reason, feels truly indifferent: if their own clothes do not concern them, somebody…
- There is no doubt that sorrow brings one down in the world. The aristocratic privilege of silence belongs, you soon find out, to only the…
- Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.
- A romantic man often feels more uplifted with two women than with one: his love seems to hit the ideal mark somewhere between two different…
- But to be quite oneself one must first waste a little time.
- She had one of those charming faces which, according to the angle from which you see them, look either melancholy or impertinent. Her eyes were…
- With three or more people there is something bold in the air: direct things get said which would frighten two people alone and conscious of…
- ..though one can be callous in Ireland one cannot be wholly opaque or material. An unearthly disturbance works in the spirit; reason can never reconcile…
More One Quotes
- In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism. — Hannah Arendt
- Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but… — Hannah Arendt
- Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake… — Hannah Arendt
- Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either… — Hannah Arendt
- To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough… — Hannah Arendt
- No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has… — Hannah Arendt
- The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the… — Hannah Arendt
- Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and… — Hannah Arendt
- I find that it's hard to fully examine one's life and not have faith be part of the discussion. — J. J. Abrams
- The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes. — Aristotle
- All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire. — Aristotle
- Jealousy is both reasonable and belongs to reasonable men, while envy is base and belongs to the base, for the one makes… — Aristotle