Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

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.

Darling, I don't want you; I've got no place for you; I only want what you give. I don't want the whole of anyone.... What you want is the whole of me-isn't it, isn't it?-and the whole of me isn't there for anybody. In that full sense you want me I don't exist.

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

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.

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

Writers do not find subjects; subjects find them.

Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye

Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.

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 to your door, you are never wholly alone

She thought she need not worry about her youth; it wasted itself spontaneously, like sunshine elsewhere or firelight in an empty room.

...there must be something she wanted; and that therefore she was no lady.

Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone her pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude.

You could see that her tremendous inside life, its solitary fears and fires, was out of accord with her humble view of herself; to hide or excuse what she felt was her first wish.

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

Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.

It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home. The need to attach themselves makes wandering people strike roots in a day: wherever we unconsciously feel, we live.

One's sentiments -- call them that -- one's fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: only when they are betrayed or, worse still, when one betrays them does one realize their power.

Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.

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.

Rich women live at such a distance from life that very often they never see their money — the Queen, they say, for instance, never carries a purse.

Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable.

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.

Some people are moulded by their aspirations, others by their hostilities.

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

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

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

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.

Looking back at a repetition of empty days, one sees that monuments have sprung up. Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie: when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.

But what a horrible world 'society' is.

People must hope so much when they tear streets up and fight at barricades. But, whoever wins, the streets are laid again and the trams start running again. One hopes too much of destroying things. If revolutions do not fail, they fail you.

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

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.

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

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out.

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

She posed as being more indolent than she felt, for fear of finding herself less able than she could wish.

She saw herself perhaps as an Elizabeth Bowen heroine - for one did not openly identify oneself with Jane Austen's heroines - and 'To The North' was her favourite novel.

It is queer to be in a place when someone has gone. It is not two other places, the place that they were there in, and the place that was there before they came. I can't get used to this third place or to staying behind.

She was in that flagging mood when to go on living seems only to load more unmeaning moments on to your memory.

You must show him your monkey: I am sure he will like that.

He feels spikes everywhere and rushes to impale himself.

You don't much like anything, do you?" "No, nothing," said Anna, smiling her nice fat malign smile.

What you want is the whole of me—isn't it, isn't it?—and the whole of me isn't there for anybody. In that full sense you want me I don't exist.

There are still places I cannot walk past, though we only walked here those two days. When I walk I look for places we did not go.

For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realisation is something of an ordeal. 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.

Darling, I don’t want you; I’ve got no place for you; I only want what you give. I don’t want the whole of anyone…What you want is the whole of me — isn't it, isn't it? — and the whole of me isn't there for anybody. In that full sense you want me I don’t exist.

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.

A living dog's better than a dead lion.

Their hands, swinging, touched lightly now and then; their nearness was as natural as the June day.

Makes of men date, like makes of cars...

The way downhill, into the bottomless incredulity which is despair, was incandescent with flowering chestnut trees.

What I have always found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.

There were readers who could expect no more from life, and just dared to look in books to see how much they had missed.

You and I are enough to break anyone's heart—how can we not break our own?

As for Thomas, the longer he lived, the less he cared for the world.

You know, even grown-up people cannot do what they want most" "Then why grow up?

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.

Ever since that evening when you gave me my hat, I've been as true to you as I've got it in me to be. Don't force me to where untruth starts. You say nothing would make you hate me. But once make me hate myself and you'd make me hate you.

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

Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.

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

Experience isn’t interesting till it begins to repeat itself—in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience

We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can

There must be perfect towns where shadows were strong like buildings, towns secret without coldness, unaware without indifference.

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

By habit, she looked round the room she sat in. Anything she could do to it had been done; what it could do to her seemed without limit.

You never quite know when you may hope to repair the damage done by going away.

What do you want me to say?" "I wish you would say something. Our life goes by without any comment.

One does not go into the world and come home the same: isolation has altered its nature when one returns.

Are you really an orphan? Yes, I am, said Portia a shade shortly. Are you? No, not at present, but I suppose it's a thing one is bound to be.

The way one is envisaged by other people - what easier way is there of envisaging oneself? There is a fatalism in one's acceptance of it. Solitude is not the solution, one feels followed. Choice - choice of those who are to surround one, choice of those most likely to see you rightly - is the only escape.

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'.

By the rules of fiction, with which life to be credible must comply, he was as a character "impossible" - each time they met, for instance, he showed no shred or trace of having been continuous since they last met.

Darling, I don't want you; I've got no place for you; I only want what you give. I don't want the whole of anyone. I haven't wanted to hurt you; I haven't wanted to touch you in any way. When I try and show you the truth I fill you with such despair. Life is so much more impossible than you think.

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. This isolation, young love and hero worship accomplish without remorse; they hardly know tenderness.

It is a wary business, walking about a strange house you know you are to know well. Only cats and dogs with their more expressive bodies enact the tension we share with them at such times. The you inside gathers up defensively; something is stealing upon you every moment; you will never be the same again.

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.

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.

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.

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

That Sunday, from six o'clock in the evening, it was a Viennese orchestra that played.

People in love, in whom every sense is open, cannot beat off the influence of a place.

Grown-up people seem to be busy by clockwork: even when someone is not ill, when there has been no telegram, they run their unswerving course from object to object, directed by some mysterious inner needle that points all the time to what they must do next. You can only marvel at such misuse of time.

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.

Fiction is an art that calls for the strictest attention to the real - whether the writer is writing a naturalistic story or a fantasy. I mean that we always begin with what is or with what has an eminent possibility of truth about it. Even when one writes a fantasy, reality is the proper basis of it. A thing is fantastic because it is so real, so real that it is fantastic. Graham Greene has said that he can't write, "I stood over a bottomless pit," because that couldn't be true, or "Running down the stairs I jumped into a taxi," because that couldn't be true either. But Elizabeth Bowen can write about one of her characters that "she snatched at her hair as if she heard something in it," because that is eminently possible. I would even go so far as to say that the person writing a fantasy has to be even more strictly attentive to the concrete detail than someone writing in a naturalistic vein - because the greater the story's strain on the credulity, the more convincing the properties in it have to be.

But I should never write what had happened down. One's nature is to forget, and one ought to go by that. Memory is quite unbearable enough, but even so it leaves out quite a lot. It wouldn't let one down as gently.

He specialized in a particular kind of friendship with that eight-limbed, inscrutable, treacherous creature, the happily married coupe, adapting himself closely and lightly to the composite personality. A peevish dead woman...it's absurd...ho much less humiliating for them both it would have been if she had taken a lover.

The sheer vital energy of the Woolfs always astonishes me when I stop to consider what they accomplished on any given day. Fragile she may have been, living on the edge of psychic disturbance, but think what she managed to do nonetheless -- not only the novels (every one a breakthrough in form), but all those essays and reviews, all the work of the Hogarth Press, not only reading mss. and editing, but, at least at the start, packing the books to go out! And besides all that, they lived such an intense social life. (When I went there for tea, they were always going out for dinner and often to a party later on.) The gaiety and the fun of it all, the huge sense of life! The long, long walks through London that Elizabeth Bowen told me about. And two houses to keep going! Who of us could accomplish what she did? There may be a lot of self-involvement in A Writer's Diary, but there is no self-pity (and what has to be remembered is that what Leonard published at that time was only a small part of all the journals, the part that concerned her work, so it had to be self-involved). It is painful that such genius should evoke such mean-spirited response at present. Is genius so common that we can afford to brush it aside? What does it matter if she is major or minor, whether she imitated Joyce (I believe she did not), whether her genius was a limited one, limited by class? What remains true is that one cannot pick up a single one of her books and read a page without feeling more alive. If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be?

His experiences and hers became harder and harder to tell apart; everything gathered behind them into a common memory - though singly each of them might, must, exist, decide, act; all things done alone came to be no more than a simulcra of behaviour: they waited to live again till they were together...Every love has a poetic relevance of its own...

Young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate; they like to have loud chords struck upon them. Loving art better than life they need men to be actors; only an actor moves them, with his telling smile, undomestic, out of touch with the everyday that they dread. They love to enjoy love as a system of doubts and shocks. They are right; not seeking husbands yet, they have no reason to see love socially.

The inside of the house – with its shallow door-panels, lozenge door-knobs, polished brass ball on the end of the banisters, stuffy red matt paper with stripes to artfully shadowed as to appear bars – was more than simply novel to Henrietta, it was antagonistic, as though it had been invented to put her out. She felt the house was acting, nothing seemed to be natural; objects did not wait to be seen but came crowding in on her, each with what amounted to its aggressive cry.

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.

After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee. Pictures would not be hung plumb over the centres of fireplaces or wallpapers pasted on with such precision that their seams make no break in the pattern if life were really not possible to adjudicate for. These things are what we mean when we speak of civilization: they remind us how exceedingly seldom the unseemly or unforeseeable rears its head. In this sense, the destruction of buildings and furniture is more palpably dreadful to the spirit than the destruction of human life.

Early in March the crocuses crept alight, then blazed yellow and purple in the park. In fact it is about five o'clock in the evening that the first hour of spring strikes - autumn arrives in the early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day. The air, about to darken, quickens and is run through with mysterious white light; the curtain of darkness is suspended, as though for some unprecedented event. There is perhaps no sunset, the trees are not yet budding - but the senses receive an intimation, an intimation so fine, yet striking in so directly, that this appears a movement in one's own spirit. This exalts whatever feeling is in the heart.

Everything in her life, she could see now, had taken the same turn—as for love, she often puzzled and puzzled, without ever allowing herself to be fully sad, as to what could be wrong with the formula. It does not work, she thought. At times there were moments when she asked herself if she could have been in the wrong: she would almost rather think that. What she thought she regretted was her lack of guard, her wayward extravagance—but had she all the time been more guarded than she imagined, had she been deceitful, had she been seen through? For what had always happened she could still not account. There seemed to be some way she did not know of by which people managed to understand each other.

Leopold was not even interested in hurting, and was only tweaking her petals off or her wings off with the intention of exploring himself. His dispassionateness was more dire, to Henrietta, than cruelty. With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

The restaurant was waning, indifferently relaxing its illusion: for the late-comers a private illusion took its place. Their table seemed to stand on their own carpet; they had a sensation of custom, sedateness, of being inside small walls, as though dining at home again after her journey. She told him about her Mount Morris solitary suppers, in the middle of the library, the rim of the tray just not touching the base of the lamp... the fire behind her back softly falling in on its own ash-no it had not been possible to feel lonely among those feeling things.

They had met one another, at first not very often, throughout the heady autumn of the first London air raids. Never had a season been more felt; one bought the poetic sense of it with the sense of death. Out of mists of morning charred by the smoke from ruins each day rose to a height of unmisty glitter; between the last of sunset and first note of the siren the darkening glassy tenseness of evening was drawn fine. From the moment of waking you tasted the sweet autumn not less because of an acridity on the tongue and nostrils; and as the singed dust settled and smoke diluted you felt more and more called upon to observe daytime as a pure and curious holiday from fear. All through London the ropings-off of dangerous tracts of streets made islands of exalted if stricken silence, and people crowded against the ropes to admire the sunny emptiness on the other side. The diversion of traffic out of blocked main thoroughfares into byways, the unstopping phatasmagoric streaming of lorries, buses, vans, drays, taxis past modest windows and quiet doorways set up an overpowering sense of London’s organic power – somewhere there was a source from which heavy motion boiled, surged and, not to be damned up, force itself into new channels.