Quotes from Elizabeth Bowen

But I should never write what had happened down. One's nature is to forget, and one ought to go by that. Memory is quite unbearable enough, but even so it leaves out quite a lot.

In a library in a staid South Coast resort of retirees

Everything ungirt, artless, ardent, urgent about Louie was to the fore: all over herself she gave the impression of twisted stockings.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

You think I exaggerate." "At the moment—" "Well, this sort of moment never really stops . . .

Some of my ideas get enlarged almost before I have them.

Where they were concerned, the ban, the check, the caution as to all spending and most of all the expenditure of feeling restricted them. Wariness had driven away poetry: from hesitating to feel came the moment you no longer could.

He left her and looked round for his glass again. Meanwhile, he said to himself in a quoting voice: "We are minor in everything but our passions." "Wherever did you read that?" "Nowhere: I woke up and heard myself saying it, one night." "How pompous you were in the night. I'm so glad I was asleep.

I am often upset when I meet a person again.

She was anxious to be someone, and, no one having ever voiced a prejudice in her hearing without impressing her, had come to associate prejudice with identity. You could not be someone without disliking things.

There was some nerve in his feeling he did not want touched: he protected it without knowing where it was.

If they should only be ill,' she said, 'there would be so many little things we could do for them. It does seem in a kind of a way an opportunity. I often think it is only when a man is ill that he understands what a woman means in his life.

Better to be rooted out hurt, bleeding, alive, like the daisies from the turf, than blow faintly away across the lawn like a straw.

But a man must live. Not for nothing do we invest so much of ourselves in other people's lives—or even in momentary pictures of people we do not know. It cuts both ways: the happy group inside the lighted window, the figure in long grass in the orchard seen from the train stay and support us in our dark hours. Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

Henrietta knew of the heart as an organ; she privately saw it covered in red plush and believed that it could not break, though it might tear.

But something that should have been going on had not gone on: something had not happened.

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

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.

We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't.

Mrs. Heccomb tapped on the glass, and the taxi, which already intended stopping, stopped dead with a satirical jerk.

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

For God's sake, is there no plain man?

made articulate seemed to

She never foresaw their marriage, its days and nights, other than as embowered by dazzling acres, blossoms a snowy blaze and with honeyed stamens, by sun then moonlight, till came later - fruited boughs bowed, voluptuous, to the ground, gumminess oozing from bloomy plums. She had been a DH Lawrence reader and a townswoman.