Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

The way one is envisaged by other people - what easier way is there of envisaging oneself? There is a fatalism in one's acceptance of it. Solitude is not the solution, one feels followed. Choice - choice of those who are to surround one, choice of those most likely to see you rightly - is the only escape.

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

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.

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.

Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone the pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude. She had never landed at Cork, so this hill and that hill beyond were as unexpected as pictures at which you say "Oh look!" Nobody was beside her to share the moment, which would have been imperfect with anyone else there.