Quotes from Elizabeth Bowen

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

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

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

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.

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

The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.

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

we can surmount the anger we feel. To find oneself like a young tree inside a tomb is to discover the power to crack the tomb and grow up to any height.

Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?

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

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.

Have not all poetic truths been already stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be final.

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.

Every love has a poetic relevance of its own; each love brings to light only what to it is relevant. Outside lies the junk-yard of what does not matter.

memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.

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

Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.

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

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

... love dreads being isolated, being left to speak in a void -- at the beginning it would often rather listen than speak.

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

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

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 on them.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.