Quotes from Elizabeth Bowen

It is about five o'clock in an evening that the first hour of spring strikes — autumn arrives in the early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.

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

Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.

On the subject of dress almost no one, for one or another reason, feels truly indifferent: if their own clothes do not concern them, somebody else's do.

There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

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

Absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.

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

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is in your eye.

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

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

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.

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart.

Livvy noted there seemed some communal feeling between the married: any wife could be faintly rude to anyone else's husband.

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

Looking back at a repetition of empty days, one sees that monuments have sprung up. Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie: when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.

But what a horrible world 'society' is.

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out.

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.

The belt slid down her thin hips, and she nervously gripped at it, pulling it up. Short sleeves showed her very thin arms and big delicate elbow joints. Her body was all concave and jerkily fluid lines; it moved with sensitive looseness, loosely threaded together: each movement had a touch of exaggeration , as though some secret power kept springing out.

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

But Miss Pym gave an impression, somehow, of having been attacked from within .

The way one is envisaged by other people - what easier way is there of envisaging oneself? There is a fatalism in one's acceptance of it. Solitude is not the solution, one feels followed. Choice - choice of those who are to surround one, choice of those most likely to see you rightly - is the only escape.