Elizabeth Bowen

“Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.”

“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.”

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

“It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.”

“There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.”

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

“Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.”

“Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.”

“I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.”

“Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.”

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

“Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.”

“The way one is envisaged by other people - what easier way is there of envisaging oneself? There is a fatalism in one's acceptance of it. Solitude is not the solution, one feels followed. Choice - choice of those who are to surround one, choice of those most likely to see you rightly - is the only escape.”

“We are minor in everything but our passions.”

“The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved is part of one's self-respect.”

“The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.”

“Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.”

“Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.”

“Livvy noted there seemed some communal feeling between the married: any wife could be faintly rude to anyone else's husband.”

“That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.”