Elizabeth Bowen Quotes - Page 7

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• Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Unique, Ideas, People

  ELIZABETH BOWEN (1935). “The House in Paris”

  7 Copy quote

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

  Elizabeth Bowen

  War, Brain, Toxic

  Elizabeth Bowen (2015). “Bowen's Court & Seven Winters”, p.221, Random House

  8 Copy quote

• Story involves action. Action towards an end not to be foreseen (by the reader) but also towards an end which, having been reached, must be seen to have been from the start inevitable.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Stories, Action, Ends

  Elizabeth Bowen (1950). “Collected Impressions”

  4 Copy quote

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

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Country, Literature, Married

  Elizabeth Bowen (1998). “Bowen's Court”

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Relationship, Money, Air

  ELIZABETH BOWEN (1935). “The House in Paris”

  11 Copy quote

• Childish fantasy, like the sheath over the bud, not only protects but curbs the terrible budding spirit, protects not only innocence from the world, but the world from the power of innocence.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Bud, World, Spirit

  Elizabeth Bowen (2015). “The Death Of The Heart”, p.326, Random House

  4 Copy quote

• Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant; impossible socially, but full scale; and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Depression, Giants, Impossible

  5 Copy quote

• Often when I write I am trying to make words do the work of line and color. I have the painter's sensitivity to light. Much of my writing is verbal painting.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Writing, Light, Color

  4 Copy quote

• 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 happy state- or, at least, to the state when pain keeps within bounds.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Pain, Silence, Doubt

  Elizabeth Bowen (1938). “The death of the heart”, Viking Pr

  5 Copy quote

• children like change - for one thing, they never anticipate regret.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Children, Regret, Anticipate

  Elizabeth Bowen (1998). “Bowen's Court”

  4 Copy quote

• The Irish landowner, partly from laziness but also from an indifferent delicacy, does not interfere in the lives of the people round. Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland, but these cannot operate the whole time: on the whole, the landowner leaves his tenants and work-people to make their own mistakes, while he makes his.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Sports, Mistake, Two

  4 Copy quote

• Memory must be patchy; what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out - unique to oneself, one's own, one's claim to identity, it implicates one's identity in its fibbing.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Memories, Unique, Identity

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Memories, Powerful, Half

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Country, Personality, Matter

  "The Last September". Book by Elizabeth Bowen, 1929.

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Home, Theatre

  6 Copy quote

• ... into the novel goes such taste as I have for rational behaviour and social portraiture. The short story, as I see it to be, allows for what is crazy about humanity: obstinacies, inordinate heroisms, "immortal longings.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Crazy, Humanity, Taste

  Elizabeth Bowen (1959). “Stories”

  4 Copy quote

• Raids are slightly constipating.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  4 Copy quote

• 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 or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Love, Lonely, Pain

  Elizabeth Bowen (1938). “The death of the heart”, Viking Pr

  10 Copy quote

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

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Ties, Remember, Tradition

  Elizabeth Bowen (1938). “The death of the heart”, Viking Pr

  5 Copy quote

• 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 still, when one betrays them does one realize their power.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Doe, Betrayed, Realizing

  5 Copy quote

• The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Heart, Thinking, People

  Elizabeth Bowen (2015). “The Death Of The Heart”, p.163, Random House

  12 Copy quote

• Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Passion, May, Habit

  Elizabeth Bowen (2015). “The Heat Of The Day”, p.99, Random House

  5 Copy quote

• Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Elizabeth Bowen (2015). “The House In Paris”, p.88, Random House

  4 Copy quote

• Grown-up people seem to be busy by clockwork... They run their unswerving course from object to object, directed by some mysterious inner needle that points all the time to what they must do next. You can only marvel at such misuse of time.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Running, Time, People

  4 Copy quote

• Expectations are the most perilous form of dream, and when dreams do realise themselves it is in the waking world: the difference is subtly but often painfully felt.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Dream, Differences, Expectations

  Elizabeth Bowen (1938). “The death of the heart”, Viking Pr

  4 Copy quote

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