Quotes from Elizabeth Bowen

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

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.

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

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

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 her pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved is part of one's self-respect.

Experience isn't interesting till it begins to repeat itself-in fact till it does that it hardly is experience.

Spoilt pleasure is a sad, unseemly thing; you can only bury it.

Disappointment tears the bearable film off life.

Sins cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life.

Love of privacy - perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society - has become in many people almost pathological.

Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.

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