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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Sheridan Le Fanu Irish Novelist
- James Joyce Irish Novelist
- Laurence Sterne Irish Anglican Novelist
- Brendan Behan Irish Poet
- Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington Irish Novelist
- Edmund Burke British Philosopher, Statesman
- Joyce Cary English Novelist
- Samuel Lover Irish Writer, Artist, Songwriter
- Jonathan Swift Irish Satirist
- Oscar Wilde Irish Poet, Playwright
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