Elizabeth Bowen

“When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.”

“If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.”

“Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.”

“And because no one answered or cared and a conversation went on without her she felt profoundly lonely, suspecting once more for herself a particular doom of exclusion. Something of the trees in their intimacy of shadow was shared by the husband and wife and their host in the tree-shadowed room. She thought of love with its gift of importance. "I must break in on all this," she thought as she looked around the room.”

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

“Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.”

“I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.”

“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.”

“All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.”

“Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.”

“She posed as being more indolent than she felt, for fear of finding herself less able than she could wish.”

“Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.”

“The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.”

“The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.”

“One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.”

“Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.”

“No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.”