Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

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

Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.

Mr. [Aldous] Huxley has been the alarming young man for a long time, a sort of perpetual clever nephew who can be relied on to flutter the lunch party. Whatever will he say next? How does he think of those things? He has been deplored once or twice, but feeling is in his favor: he is steadily read. He is at once the truly clever person and the stupid person's idea of the clever person; he is expected to be relentless, to administer intellectual shocks.

In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.

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

But to be quite oneself one must first waste a little time.

Silences can be as different as sounds.

Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.

life is a succession of readjustments.

We are minor in everything but our passions.

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

The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.

Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man.

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

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

somehow at parties at which one stays standing up one seems to require to be more concentratedly intelligent than one does at those at which one can sit down.

memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.

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

without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold.

I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.

Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?

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.

The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.

Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.