Quotes from Elizabeth Bowen

Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.

Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant -impossible socially, but full-scale. It's the knockings and batterings we sometimes hear in each other that keep our intercourse from utter banality.

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.

Who ever is adequate? We all create situations which others can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't.

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

With three or more people there is something bold in the air: direct things get said which would frighten two people alone and conscious of each inch of their nearness to one another. To be three is to be in public - you feel safe.

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

Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.

Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man.

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

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

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

Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.

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.

[A writer] should try not to be too far, personally, below the level of his work.

The paradox of romantic love -- that what one possesses, one can no longer desire -- was at work.

In big houses in which things are done properly, there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.

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.

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft.

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.

The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.