Quotes from Elizabeth Bowen

Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.

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

If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.

Imagination of my kind is most caught, most fired, most worked upon by the unfamiliar: I have thrivenon the changes and chances, the dislocations andcontrasts which have made up so much of my life.

In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.

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

One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.

Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.

life is a succession of readjustments.

All my life I have said, "Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs"--and what a mistake.

The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy and temperamental; it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.

Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

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

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

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

Ghosts seem harder to please than we are; it is as though they haunted for haunting's sake -- much as we relive, brood, and smoulder over our pasts.

If one didn't let oneself swallow some few lies, I don't know how one would ever carry the past.

Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.

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

To seek pleasure makes a hero of anyone: you open yourself so entirely to fate.

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.

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.

Education is not so important as people think.