Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

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

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

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

Each of us keeps battened down inside himself a sort of lunatic giant -impossible socially but full-scale. It's the knockings and batterings we sometimes hear in each other that keep our intercourse from utter banality.

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

Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates it's own objects: is this not also true of fear?

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

He specialized in a particular kind of friendship with that eight-limbed, inscrutable, treacherous creature, the happily married coupe, adapting himself closely and lightly to the composite personality.A peevish dead woman...it's absurd...how much less humiliating for them both it would have been if she had taken a lover.