Elizabeth Bowen > Quotes

“Darling, I don't want you; I've got no place for you; I only want what you give. I don't want the whole of anyone.... What you want is the whole of me-isn't it, isn't it?-and the whole of me isn't there for anybody. In that full sense you want me I don't exist.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“A romantic man often feels more uplifted with two women than with one: his love seems to hit the ideal mark somewhere between two different faces.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“But to be quite oneself one must first waste a little time.”
― Elizabeth Bowen

“She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“When you love someone, all your saved-up wishes start coming out.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, A World of Love

“Writers do not find subjects; subjects find them.”
― Elizabeth Bowen

“Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, Bowen's Court & Seven Winters

“Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone the pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude. She had never landed at Cork, so this hill and that hill beyond were as unexpected as pictures at which you say "Oh look!" Nobody was beside her to share the moment, which would have been imperfect with anyone else there.”
― Elizabeth Bowen

“No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye”
― Elizabeth Bowen

“The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet-when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“Never to lie is to have no lock to your door, you are never wholly alone”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“Some people are moulded by their aspirations, others by their hostilities.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home. The need to attach themselves makes wandering people strike roots in a day: wherever we unconsciously feel, we live.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“She thought she need not worry about her youth; it wasted itself spontaneously, like sunshine elsewhere or firelight in an empty room.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September

“One's sentiments -- call them that -- one's fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: only when they are betrayed or, worse still, when one betrays them does one realize their power.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone her pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“...there must be something she wanted; and that therefore she was no lady.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“You could see that her tremendous inside life, its solitary fears and fires, was out of accord with her humble view of herself; to hide or excuse what she felt was her first wish.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day

“But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it?”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September

“She had one of those charming faces which, according to the angle from which you see them, look either melancholy or impertinent. Her eyes were grey; her trick of narrowing them made her seem to reflect, the greater part of the time, in the dusk of her second thoughts. With that mood, that touch of arriere pensee, went an uncertain, speaking set of lips.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day

“Rich women live at such a distance from life that very often they never see their money — the Queen, they say, for instance, never carries a purse.”
― Elizabeth Bowen

“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.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable.”
― Elizabeth Bowen

“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.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.”
― Elizabeth Bowen

“Livvy noted there seemed some communal feeling between the married: any wife could be faintly rude to anyone else's husband.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September