Quotes by "Elizabeth Bowen"

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

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

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

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

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

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 each inch of their nearness to one another. To be three is to be in public - you feel safe.

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

In big houses in which things are done properly, there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.

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 faces.

Everything in her life, she could see now, had taken the same turn—as for love, she often puzzled and puzzled, without ever allowing herself to be fully sad, as to what could be wrong with the formula. It does not work, she thought. At times there were moments when she asked herself if she could have been in the wrong: she would almost rather think that. What she thought she regretted was her lack of guard, her wayward extravagance—but had she all the time been more guarded than she imagined, had she been deceitful, had she been seen through? For what had always happened she could still not account. There seemed to be some way she did not know of by which people managed to understand each other.

Don't you see we're all full of horrible power, working against each other however much we may love?

To love makes one less clever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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