Elizabeth Bowen Quotes & Sayings

Livvy noted there seemed some communal feeling between the married: any wife could be faintly rude to anyone else's husband. — Elizabeth Bowen

But complex people are never certain that they are not crooks, never certain their passports are quite in order, and are, therefore, unnerved by the slightest thing. — Elizabeth Bowen

She had one of those charming faces which, according to the angle from which you see them, look either melancholy or impertinent. Her eyes were grey; her trick of narrowing them made her seem to reflect, the greater part of the time, in the dusk of her second thoughts. With that mood, that touch of arriere pensee, went an uncertain, speaking set of lips. — Elizabeth Bowen

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. — Elizabeth Bowen

Without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold. — Elizabeth Bowen

First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences, gestures, attitudes, a burning phrase with no context. — Elizabeth Bowen

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

I don't know what's come over this place,' Maud stated. 'However, the Lord did, so in despair He showed me what I had better do.'
'And did the Lord suggest your sticking up your father for ten shillings?'
'No, I thought of that,' said Maud, not turning a hair. — Elizabeth Bowen

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. — Elizabeth Bowen

For God's sake, is there no plain man? — Elizabeth Bowen

Two things are terrible in childhood: helplessness (being in other people's power) and apprehension - the apprehension that something is being concealed from us because it is too bad to be told. — Elizabeth Bowen

Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing. — Elizabeth Bowen

Dialogue is the ideal means of showing what is between the characters. It crystallizes relationships. It should, ideally, be so effective as to make analysis or explanation of the relationships between the characters unnecessary. — Elizabeth Bowen

Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft ... — Elizabeth Bowen

Imagination of my kind is most caught, most fired, most worked upon by the unfamiliar: I have thrivenon the changes and chances, the dislocations andcontrasts which have made up so much of my life. — Elizabeth Bowen

The novelist's
any writer's
object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen. — Elizabeth Bowen

I swear that each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant - impossible socially, but full-scale - and that it's the knockings and baterrings we sometimes hear in each other that keeps our intercourse from utter banaility. — Elizabeth Bowen

If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea. — Elizabeth Bowen

Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland ... — Elizabeth Bowen

The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved is part of one's self-respect. — Elizabeth Bowen

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. — Elizabeth Bowen

The happy passive nature, locked up with itself like a mirror in an airy room, reflects what goes on but demands not to be approached. — Elizabeth Bowen

A smell of sandalwood boxes, a kind of glaze on the air from all the chintzes numbed his earthy vitality, he became all ribs and uniform. — Elizabeth Bowen

To leap is not only to leap, it is to hit the ground somewhere. — Elizabeth Bowen

Dialogue should show the relationships among people. — Elizabeth Bowen

When you love someone, all your saved-up wishes start coming out. — Elizabeth Bowen

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

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

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

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am. — Elizabeth Bowen

Henrietta knew of the heart as an organ; she privately saw it covered in red plush and believed that it could not break, though it might tear. — Elizabeth Bowen

He feels spikes everywhere and rushes to impale himself. — Elizabeth Bowen

Innocence so constantly finds itself in a false position that inwardly innocent people learn to be disingenuous. Finding no language to speak in their own terms they resign themselves to being translated imperfectly. They exist alone; when they try and enter into relations they compromise falsifyingly- through anxiety, through desire to impart and to feel warmth. The system of our affections is too corrupt for them. They are bound to blunder, then to be told they cheat...Their singleness, their ruthlessness, their one continuous wish makes them bound to be cruel, and to suffer cruelty. — Elizabeth Bowen

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

The passion of vanity has its own depths in the spirit, and is powerfully militant. — Elizabeth Bowen

The stupid person's idea of the clever person. [on Aldous Huxley, in Spectator magazine, 1936] — Elizabeth Bowen

Disappointment tears the bearable film of life. — Elizabeth Bowen

It appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy, little is quite impossible. — Elizabeth Bowen

I can't help thinking
Suppose the world was made for happiness after all. — Elizabeth Bowen

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

The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance
due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author's attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful
and possibly the only
help that can be given. — Elizabeth Bowen

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

[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet. — Elizabeth Bowen

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

Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat. — Elizabeth Bowen

She was young-looking--most because of the impression she gave of still being on happy sensuous terms with life. — Elizabeth Bowen

Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little, even if one did once know what one meant. — Elizabeth Bowen

The most steady, the most self-sufficient nature depends, more than it knows, on its few chosen stimuli. — Elizabeth Bowen

All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved. — Elizabeth Bowen

A Bowen, in the first place, made Bowen's Court. Since then, with a rather alarming sureness, Bowen's Court has made all the succeeding Bowens. — Elizabeth Bowen

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

I can't see or feel the conflict between love and religion. To me, they're the same thing. — Elizabeth Bowen

At Spezia when I am angry I go full of smoke inside, but when you make me angry I see everything. — Elizabeth Bowen

For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal. — Elizabeth Bowen

Rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate - it slid and melted away. — Elizabeth Bowen

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

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

Every short story is an experiment - what one must ask is not only, did it come off, but was it, as an experiment, worth making? — Elizabeth Bowen

Whenever possible I avoid talking. Reprieve from talking is my idea of a holiday. At risk of seeming unsociable, which I am, I admit I love to be left in a beatific trance, when I am in one. Friendly Romans recognize that wish. — Elizabeth Bowen

The furniture would have missed you?
Furniture's knowing all right. Not much gets past the things in a room, I daresay, and chairs and tables don't go to the grave so soon. Every time I take the soft cloth to that stuff in the drawingroom, I could say, 'Well, you know a bit more'. — Elizabeth Bowen

Roughly, the action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown. In the first half of a novel, the unpredictability should be the more striking. In the second half, the inevitability should be the more striking. — Elizabeth Bowen

The writer, unlike his non-writing adult friend, has no predisposed outlook; he seldom observes deliberately. He sees what he didnot intend to see; he remembers what does not seem wholly possible. Inattentive learner in the schoolroom of life, he keeps some faculty free to veer and wander. His is the roving eye. — Elizabeth Bowen

Short of a small range of physical acts-a fight, murder, lovemaking-dialogue is the most vigorous and visible inter-action of which characters in a novel are capable. Speech is what characters do to each other. — Elizabeth Bowen

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

She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her. — Elizabeth Bowen

Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience. — Elizabeth Bowen

Forgiveness should be an act, but this is a state with him. — Elizabeth Bowen

Who is ever adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't. — Elizabeth Bowen

Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another. — Elizabeth Bowen

And because no one answered or cared and a conversation went on without her she felt profoundly lonely, suspecting once more for herself a particular doom of exclusion. Something of the trees in their intimacy of shadow was shared by the husband and wife and their host in the tree-shadowed room. She thought of love with its gift of importance. "I must break in on all this," she thought as she looked around the room. — Elizabeth Bowen

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

The story must spring from an impression or perception pressing enough to have made the writer write. It should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure. — Elizabeth Bowen

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

Love is obtuse and reckless; it interferes. — Elizabeth Bowen

No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden. — Elizabeth Bowen

A living dog's better than a dead lion. — Elizabeth Bowen

In this state, drugged by the rainy dusk, she almost always returned with sensual closeness to seaside childhood; once more she felt her heels in the pudding-softness of the hot tarred esplanade or her bare arm up to the elbow in rain-wet tamarisk. She smelt the shingle and heard it being sucked by the sea. — Elizabeth Bowen

My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without - a so-called normal relation to society. My books are my relation to society. — Elizabeth Bowen

Style is the thing that's always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style. — Elizabeth Bowen

Knowledge of Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain through the thinning shoe-leather ... When it comes to knowing, the senses are more honest than the intelligence. Nothing is more real than the first wall you lean up against sobbing with exhaustion. Rome no more than beheld (that is, taken in through the eyes only) could still be a masterpiece in cardboard - the eye I suppose being of all the organs the most easily infatuated and then jaded and so tricked. Seeing is pleasure, but not knowledge. — Elizabeth Bowen

Overhead, an enemy plane had been dragging, drumming slowly round in the pool of night, drawing up bursts of gunfire
nosing, pausing, turning, fascinated to the point for its intent. The barrage banged, coughed, retched; in here the lights in the mirrors rocked. Now down a shaft of anticipating silence the bomb swung whistling. With the shock of detonation, still to be heard, four walls of in here yawped in then bellied out; bottles danced on glass; a distortion ran through the view. The detonation dulled off into the cataracting roar of a split building:
direct hit,
somewhere else. — Elizabeth Bowen

The paradox of romantic love
that what one possesses, one can no longer desire
was at work. — Elizabeth Bowen

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

But Miss Pym gave an impression, somehow, of having been attacked from within. — Elizabeth Bowen

The belt slid down her thin hips, and she nervously gripped at it, pulling it up. Short sleeves showed her very thin arms and big delicate elbow joints. Her body was all concave and jerkily fluid lines; it moved with sensitive looseness, loosely threaded together: each movement had a touch of exaggeration , as though some secret power kept springing out. — Elizabeth Bowen

When one is a child, the disposition of objects, tables and chairs and doors, seems part of the natural order: a house-move lets in chaos - as it does for a dog. — Elizabeth Bowen

One should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over. — Elizabeth Bowen

Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town. — Elizabeth Bowen

[A writer] should try not to be too far, personally, below the level of his work. — Elizabeth Bowen

Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have. — Elizabeth Bowen

It is in this unearthly first hour of spring twilight that earth's almost agonized livingness is most felt. This hour is so dreadful to some people that they hurry indoors and turn on the lights. — Elizabeth Bowen

But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it? — Elizabeth Bowen

History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts; it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called 'eternal.' What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate. — Elizabeth Bowen

Each piece of dialogue MUST be "something happening" ... The "amusing" for its OWN sake should above all be censored ... The functional use of dialogue for the plot must be the first thing in the writer's mind. Where functional usefulness cannot be established, dialogue must be left out. — Elizabeth Bowen

As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am. — Elizabeth Bowen

Raids are slightly constipating. — Elizabeth Bowen

If he could have been reembodied, at that moment a black wind would have rushed through the Villa Fioretta, wrenching the shutters off and tearing the pictures down, or an earthquake cracked the floors, or the olivey hill above the villa erupted, showering hot choking ash. — Elizabeth Bowen

Princess Bibesco delighted in a semi-ideal world - a world which, though having a counterpart in her experience, was to a great extent brought into being by her own temperament and, one might say, flair. — Elizabeth Bowen

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies. — Elizabeth Bowen

Spezia offered Leopold almost nothing: his precocity devoured itself there, rejecting the steep sunny coast and nibbling blue edge of the sea that had drowned Shelley. His spirit became crustacean under douches of culture and mild philosophic chat from his Uncle Dee, who was cultured rather than erudite. — Elizabeth Bowen