Quotes from Elizabeth Bowen

But here I do see how everyone feels." "I wonder if I like that," said Eddie. "I suspect how people feel, and that seems to me bad enough—I wonder if the truth would be worse or better. The truth, of course I mean, about other people. I know only too well how I feel.

He was not sprightly enough to have sprightly friends.

Yes," said Daphne, repressively.

To remember can be at times no more than a cold duty, for we remember only in the limited way that is bearable. 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.

They had sat round a painted, not a burning, fire, at which you tried in vain to warm your hands.....

Don't you see we're all full of horrible power, working against each other however much we may love?

He said he judged people by their characters. I said was that always a quite good way of judging, as people's characters get so different at times, as it depends so much what happens to them.

There can occur in lives a subsidence under the soil, so that, without the surface having been visibly broken, gradients alter, uprights cant a little out of the straight.

Love is obtuse and reckless; it interferes.

In this state, drugged by the rainy dusk, she almost always returned with sensual closeness to seaside childhood; once more she felt her heels in the pudding-softness of the hot tarred esplanade or her bare arm up to the elbow in rain-wet tamarisk. She smelt the shingle and heard it being sucked by the sea.

People would eat a boot if it was home made.

The sun rose on a landscape still pale with the heat of the day before. There was no haze, but a sort of coppery burnish out of the air lit on flowing fields, rocks, the face of the one house and the cliff of limestone overhanging the river. The river gorge cut deep through the uplands. This light at this hour, so unfamiliar, brought into being a new world – painted, expectant, empty, intense.

In you there may persist some spark of what's everywhere else gone out: who knows why else I've loved you? Through love you've lit me – don't quarrel now with which way the fire blows.

I cannot say anything about going away. I cannot say anything even in this diary. Perhaps it is better not to say anything ever. I must try not to say anything more to Eddie, when I have said things it has always been a mistake.

He saw in this over-acting a kind of bluffing, which made him like Anna, whom he liked much, more.

She had this one limitation, his darling Lois; she couldn't look on her own eyes, had no idea what she was, resented almost his attention being so constantly fixed on something she wasn't aware of.

What is it exactly," she asked, "that they mean by freedom? What does it affect? What is it besides an excuse for war?

he felt her knocking through him like another heart outside his own ribs.

To love makes one less clever.

People are most themselves when suddenly woken, or when they pull darkness over their heads, or when, in the middle of the night, they commit themselves to some momentous decision.

Language seldom fails quietly, it fails noisily.

All the way up the house the windows were open; light came diagonally from window to window through corner rooms. Two storeys up, she could have heard a curtain rustle, but the mansion piled itself up in silence over the Montmorencys' voices.

Any intimations of Fate, like a step heard on the stairs, makes some natures want to crouch in the safe dark.

What is being said is the effect of something that has happened; at the same time, what is being said is in itself something happening, which will, in turn, leave its effect.