Quotes from Elizabeth Bowen

We are minor in everything but our passions.

Makes of men date, like makes of car.

Autumn arrives in the early morning.

The silence of a shut park does not sound like country silence: it is tense and confined.

It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.

Art is for [the Irish] inseparable from artifice: of that, the theatre is the home. Possibly, it was England made me a novelist.

There's something so showy about desperation, it takes hard wits to see it's a grandiose form of funk.

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.

Good-byes breed a sort of distaste for whomever you say good-bye to; this hurts, you feel, this must not happen again.

...the power-loving temperament is more dangerous when it either prefers or is forced to operate in what is materially a void. Wehave everything to dread from the dispossessed.

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.