Elizabeth Bowen Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Elizabeth Bowen quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate - it slid and melted away.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Education is not so important as people think.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.
— Elizabeth Bowen
It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
— Elizabeth Bowen
All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Every short story is an experiment - what one must ask is not only, did it come off, but was it, as an experiment, worth making?
— Elizabeth Bowen
Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland ...
— Elizabeth Bowen
![Elizabeth Bowen Quotes By Elizabeth Bowen: Art is for [the Irish] inseparable from artifice:](https://www.wisefamousquotes.com/images/elizabeth-bowen-quotes-by-elizabeth-bowen-798662.jpg "Elizabeth Bowen Quotes By Elizabeth Bowen: Art is for [the Irish] inseparable from artifice:")
Art is for [the Irish] inseparable from artifice: of that, the theatre is the home. Possibly, it was England made me a novelist.
— Elizabeth Bowen
The craft of the novelist does lie first of all in story-telling.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Though not all reading children grow up to be writers, I take it that most creative writers must in their day have been reading children.
— Elizabeth Bowen
The silence of a shut park does not sound like the country silence; it is tense and confined.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?
— Elizabeth Bowen
Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
— Elizabeth Bowen
No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Life is a succession of readjustments.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Wariness had driven away poetry; from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Love dreads being isolated, being left to speak in a void at the beginning it would often rather listen than speak. — Elizabeth Bowen
Nobody ever dies of an indignity.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Silences can be as different as sounds.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Certain books come to meet me, as do people.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Meetings that do not come off keep a character of their own. They stay as they were projected.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Makes of men date, like makes of car.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Silence sat in the taxi, as though a stranger had got in.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Dogs are a habit, I think.
— Elizabeth Bowen
I can't see or feel the conflict between love and religion. To me, they're the same thing.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Their hands, swinging, touched lightly now and then; their nearness was as natural as the June day.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Style is the thing that's always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style.
— Elizabeth Bowen
If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.
— Elizabeth Bowen
We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.
— Elizabeth Bowen
I do like Italian graves; they look so much more lived in.
— Elizabeth Bowen
As for Thomas, the longer he lived, the less he cared for the world.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Bring all your intelligence to bear on your beginning.
— Elizabeth Bowen
What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Some of my ideas get enlarged almost before I have them.
— Elizabeth Bowen
At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial games could be played.
— Elizabeth Bowen
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
She thought she need not worry about her youth; it wasted itself spontaneously, like sunshine elsewhere or firelight in an empty room.
— Elizabeth Bowen
We are minor in everything but our passions.
— Elizabeth Bowen
One should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Very young people are true but not resounding instruments.
— 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
Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.
— Elizabeth Bowen
I pity people who do not care for Society. They are poorer for the oblation they do not make.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Children like change - for one thing, they never anticipate regret.
— Elizabeth Bowen
I suspect victims; they win in the long run.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Everything ungirt, artless, ardent, urgent about Louie was to the fore: all over herself she gave the impression of twisted stockings.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Autumn arrives in the early morning.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Disappointment tears the bearable film of life.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Love of privacy - perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society - has become in many people almost pathological.
— Elizabeth Bowen
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 thing one is bound to be. — Elizabeth Bowen
Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.
— Elizabeth Bowen
The slight sense of degeneracy induced by reading novels before luncheon
— Elizabeth Bowen
Don't you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same ...
— Elizabeth Bowen
He feels spikes everywhere and rushes to impale himself.
— Elizabeth Bowen
All my life I have said, "Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs"and what a mistake. — Elizabeth Bowen
Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Artists were intended to be an ornament to society. As a society in themselves they are unthinkable.
— Elizabeth Bowen
At Spezia when I am angry I go full of smoke inside, but when you make me angry I see everything.
— Elizabeth Bowen
One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Livvy noted there seemed some communal feeling between the married: any wife could be faintly rude to anyone else's husband.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Raids are slightly constipating.
— Elizabeth Bowen
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.
— Elizabeth Bowen
No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye
— Elizabeth Bowen
She was young-looking--most because of the impression she gave of still being on happy sensuous terms with life.
— Elizabeth Bowen
The paradox of romantic love that what one possesses, one can no longer desire
was at work. — Elizabeth Bowen
Henrietta knew of the heart as an organ; she privately saw it covered in red plush and believed that it could not break, though it might tear.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.
— Elizabeth Bowen
To leap is not only to leap, it is to hit the ground somewhere.
— Elizabeth Bowen
What's the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually - our sense of personality is a sense of outrage ...
— Elizabeth Bowen
Convention was our safeguard: could one have stronger?
— Elizabeth Bowen
Spoilt pleasure is a sad, unseemly thing; you can only bury it.
— Elizabeth Bowen
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.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Have not all poetic truths been already stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be final.
— Elizabeth Bowen
She posed as being more indolent than she felt, for fear of finding herself less able than she could wish.
— Elizabeth Bowen
The process of reading is reciprocal; the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.
— 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
The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.
— Elizabeth Bowen
I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experiences, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true.
— Elizabeth Bowen
Dialogue should show the relationships among people.
— Elizabeth Bowen