Quotes from Elizabeth Bowen

What's in your mind, I suppose, is, why should you rise to occasions when I don't? Let's face it—who ever is adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't.

Did Anna also, sometimes not know what to do next? Because she knew what to do next, because she knew what to laugh at, what to say, did it always follow that she knew where to turn? Inside everyone, is there an anxious person who stands to hesitate in an empty room?

It's not just that we are incurious; we completely lack any sense of each other's existences.

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

The place gave out a look of hollow desuetude, as though its desertion would last forever.

Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little, even if one did once know what one meant.

If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.

I am much too influenced by people's manner towards me—especially Anna's I suppose. Directly people attack me, I think they are right, and hate myself, and then I hate them—the more I like them this is so.

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. A pact with life, a pact of immunity, appears to exist-But this pact is not respected for ever- a street accident, an overheard quarrel, a certain note in a voice, a face coming too close, a tree being blown down, someone's unjust fate- the peace tears right across.

It seemed to her that while people were very happy, individual persons were surely damned. So, she shrank from that specious mystery the individual throws about himself, from Anna's smiles, from Lilian's tomorrows, from the shut-in room, the turned-in heart.

I can't help thinking -- Suppose the world was made for happiness after all.

I wonder where father's gone. He repeatedly goes out but never comes in.

Frantic smiles at parties, overtures that have desperation behind them, miasmic reaches of talk with the lost bore, short cuts to approach through staring, squeezing or kissing all indicate that one cannot live alone. Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.

All the days that go by only make me seem to be getting further and further away from the day I last saw Eddie, not nearer and nearer the day I shall see him again.

You agonise me by being so agonised.

Look, let's see ourselves in the distance, then we shall think, how happy they are! We're young; this is spring; this is a wood. In some sort of way or other we love each other, and our lives are before us—God pity us! Do you hear the birds?

While I stand and regard it, the indifference to myself shown by a work of art in itself is art.

Society was self-interest given a pretty gloss.

Sacrificers," said Matchett, "are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those that they sacrifice

Plot might seem to be a matter of choice. It is not. The particular plot is something the novelist is driven to: it is what is left after the whittling-away of alternatives.' Elizabeth Bowen opened her Notes on Writing a Novel (1945, reprinted in Collected Impressions, Longmans, Green & Co.

The most we can hope is to go on getting away with it till the others get it away from us

She was a scrap of a widow, ever so plucky, just back from China, with damp little hands, a husky voice, and defective tear-ducts that gave her eyes always rather a swimmy look. She had a prostrated way of looking up at you, and that fluffy, bird's-nesty hair that hairpins get lost in.

the senses bound our feeling world: there is an abrupt break where their power stops

and Matchett, who was as strong as a nigger