About Elizabeth Bowen: Elizabeth Bowen was an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer.
Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.
No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.
It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
We are minor in everything but our passions.
All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
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.
Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.
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.
Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.
Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.
I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.
The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.
If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.
