Elizabeth Bowen Quotes
Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen, was an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer.
(1899 - 1973)
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All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
[Forgiveness]
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Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
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Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
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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.
[Human Relations]
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Education is not so important as people think.
[Education]
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Experience isn't interesting till it begins to repeat itself-in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.
[Self Knowledge]
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Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
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Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.
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For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.
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Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie; when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.
[One Day]
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I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.
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I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.
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If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.
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If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
[Positive]
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Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.
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In big houses in which things are done properly, there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.
[Wealth]
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Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
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Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
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It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
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Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
[Loneliness]
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