Quotes from Elizabeth Bowen

Ever since that evening when you gave me my hat, I've been as true to you as I've got it in me to be. Don't force me to where untruth starts. You say nothing would make you hate me. But once make me hate myself and you'd make me hate you.

The way downhill, into the bottomless incredulity which is despair, was incandescent with flowering chestnut trees.

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

At Spezia when I am angry I go full of smoke inside, but when you make me angry I see everything.

One does not go into the world and come home the same: isolation has altered its nature when one returns.

You never quite know when you may hope to repair the damage done by going away.

We observe small rites, but we defend ourselves against that terrible memory that is stronger than will. We defend ourselves from the rooms, the scenes, the objects that make for hallucination, that make the senses start up and fasten upon a ghost. We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.

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 upon them. Loving art better than life they need men to be actors; only an actor moves them, with his telling smile, undomestic, out of touch with the everyday that they dread. They love to enjoy love as a system of doubts and shocks. They are right; not seeking husbands yet, they have no reason to see love socially.

The stupid person's idea of the clever person. [on Aldous Huxley, in Spectator magazine, 1936]

Grown-up people seem to be busy by clockwork: even when someone is not ill, when there has been no telegram, they run their unswerving course from object to object, directed by some mysterious inner needle that points all the time to what they must do next. You can only marvel at such misuse of time.

There must be perfect towns where shadows were strong like buildings, towns secret without coldness, unaware without indifference.

By the rules of fiction, with which life to be credible must comply, he was as a character "impossible" - each time they met, for instance, he showed no shred or trace of having been continuous since they last met.

I swear that each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant - impossible socially, but full-scale - and that it's the knockings and baterrings we sometimes hear in each other that keeps our intercourse from utter banaility.

By habit, she looked round the room she sat in. Anything she could do to it had been done; what it could do to her seemed without limit.

Spezia offered Leopold almost nothing: his precocity devoured itself there, rejecting the steep sunny coast and nibbling blue edge of the sea that had drowned Shelley. His spirit became crustacean under douches of culture and mild philosophic chat from his Uncle Dee, who was cultured rather than erudite.

I don't know what's come over this place,' Maud stated. 'However, the Lord did, so in despair He showed me what I had better do.' 'And did the Lord suggest your sticking up your father for ten shillings?' 'No, I thought of that,' said Maud, not turning a hair.

Are you really an orphan? Yes, I am, said Portia a shade shortly. Are you? No, not at present, but I suppose it's a thing one is bound to be.

The inside of the house – with its shallow door-panels, lozenge door-knobs, polished brass ball on the end of the banisters, stuffy red matt paper with stripes to artfully shadowed as to appear bars – was more than simply novel to Henrietta, it was antagonistic, as though it had been invented to put her out. She felt the house was acting, nothing seemed to be natural; objects did not wait to be seen but came crowding in on her, each with what amounted to its aggressive cry.

His experiences and hers became harder and harder to tell apart; everything gathered behind them into a common memory - though singly each of them might, must, exist, decide, act; all things done alone came to be no more than a simulcra of behaviour: they waited to live again till they were together...Every love has a poetic relevance of its own...

I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.

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

That Sunday, from six o'clock in the evening, it was a Viennese orchestra that played.

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

But there's no end to what's been said, and I'll be a party to nothing. I was born with my mouth shut:those with their mouths open do nothing but start trouble and catch flies.