Top 219 Quotes & Sayings by Elizabeth Bowen

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

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

Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

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

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

Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.

I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.

When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.

Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.

One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.

Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.

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

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

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

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

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.

Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.

All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.

If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

Education is not so important as people think.

Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.

Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.

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

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.

We are minor in everything but our passions.

The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.

The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.

If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.

Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.

memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.

The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance--due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author's attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful--and possibly the only--help that can be given.

Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable.

we can surmount the anger we feel. To find oneself like a young tree inside a tomb is to discover the power to crack the tomb and grow up to any height.

The silence of a shut park does not sound like country silence: it is tense and confined.

Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.

Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.

My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without - a so-called normal relation to society. My books are my relation to society.

Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.

This, my first [bicycle] had an intrinsic beauty. And it opened for me an era of all but flying, which roads emptily crossing theairy, gold-gorsy Common enhanced. Nothing since has equalled that birdlike freedom.

Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.

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 one did once know what one meant

She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her.

Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market - you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane; another won't get over the right stile.

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

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 of what does not matter.

Silences can be as different as sounds.

Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man.

Certain books come to meet me, as do people.

somehow at parties at which one stays standing up one seems to require to be more concentratedly intelligent than one does at those at which one can sit down.

I am dead against art's being self-expression. I see an inherent failure in any story which fails to detach itself from the author-detach itself in the sense that a well-blown soap-bubble detaches itself from the bowl of the blower's pipe and spherically takes off into the air as a new, whole, pure, iridescent world. Whereas the ill-blown bubble, as children know, timidly adheres to the bowl's lip, then either bursts or sinks flatly back again.

Jane Austen, much in advance of her day, was a mistress of the use of the dialogue. She used it as dialogue should be used-to advance the story; not only to show the characters, but to advance.