Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Elizabeth Bowen (Irish Novelist)

Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973,) fully Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen, was a British novelist and short-story writer considered a major British novelist of the twentieth century. Her works portray the struggles of the individual will to fulfill itself in an unfamiliar, hostile world.

Born in County Cork to wealthy Anglo-Irish parents, Bowen moved to England at age seven and was raised by elderly relatives. Her writings about the unsatisfactory relationships between the upper-middle-class reflect the sense of isolation during her early life experiences.

Settling in London, Bowen published two volumes of short stories before her first novel, The Hotel (1927.) She produced a steady stream of novels and stories including The Death of the Heart (1938.)

During World War II, Bowen stayed in London and worked at the Ministry of Information during the daytime and as an air-raid warden at night. Her experiences in wartime London were personified in her best-known novel, The Heat of the Day (1949.)

Bowen’s later novels include A World of Love (1955,) The Little Girls (1964,) and Eva Trout (1969,) and the collections of essays Collected Impressions (1950) and After-thought (1962.) Also an insightful literary critic, she published English Novelists (1942.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Elizabeth Bowen

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

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

If you look at your life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
Elizabeth Bowen
Topics: Attitude, Perception, Life

It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.
Elizabeth Bowen
Topics: Emotions

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought
Elizabeth Bowen
Topics: Language

The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy and temperamental; it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.
Elizabeth Bowen
Topics: Memory, Photography, Charm

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
Topics: Realistic Expectations

Goody-byes breed a sort of distaste for whomever you say good-bye to; this hurts, you feel, this must not happen again.
Elizabeth Bowen
Topics: Change

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

Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.
Elizabeth Bowen
Topics: Motivation, Growth

Absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
Elizabeth Bowen
Topics: Absence

Nobody speaks the truth when there’s something they must have.
Elizabeth Bowen
Topics: Deception/Lying, Lying, Lies

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do
Elizabeth Bowen
Topics: Illusion

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
Topics: Words, Writing

Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
Elizabeth Bowen
Topics: Autumn, Seasons, Spring

Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.
Elizabeth Bowen
Topics: Love, Lovers

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.
Elizabeth Bowen
Topics: Art, Arts, Artists

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
Elizabeth Bowen
Topics: Perspective

Intimacies between women go backwards, beginning with revelations and ending up in small talk without loss of esteem.
Elizabeth Bowen
Topics: Friendship, Men & Women

Never to lie is to have no lock to your door, you are never wholly alone.
Elizabeth Bowen
Topics: Deception/Lying, Lying, Lies

All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
Elizabeth Bowen
Topics: Greatness, Greatness & Great Things

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
Topics: Loneliness

Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
Elizabeth Bowen
Topics: Vanity, Conceit

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

Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.
Elizabeth Bowen
Topics: One liners, Fate

Repetition makes reputation and reputation makes customers.
Elizabeth Bowen
Topics: Reputation

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
Elizabeth Bowen
Topics: Language

Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?
Elizabeth Bowen
Topics: Confidence, Anxiety, Fear

Experience isn’t interesting until it begins to repeat itself—in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.
Elizabeth Bowen
Topics: Experience, Genius

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart.
Elizabeth Bowen
Topics: Absence

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