ELIZABETH BOWEN QUOTES

Irish-British novelist & short-story writer (1899-1973)

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

ELIZABETH BOWEN

The House in Paris

Tags: fate


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


It is queer to be in a place when someone has gone. It is not two other places, the place that they were there in, and the place that was there before they came. I can't get used to this third place or to staying behind.

ELIZABETH BOWEN

The Death of the Heart


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


If one didn't let oneself swallow some few lies, I don't know how one would ever carry the past.

ELIZABETH BOWEN

The Death of the Heart


Ghosts seem harder to please than we are; it is as though they haunted for haunting's sake -- much as we relive, brood, and smoulder over our pasts.

ELIZABETH BOWEN

preface, The Second Ghost Book


Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.

ELIZABETH BOWEN

The House in Paris


No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.

ELIZABETH BOWEN

Collected Impressions


To seek pleasure makes a hero of anyone: you open yourself so entirely to fate.

ELIZABETH BOWEN

The House in Paris


When you love someone, all your saved-up wishes start coming out.

ELIZABETH BOWEN

A World of Love


One does not go into the world and come home the same: isolation has altered its nature when one returns.

ELIZABETH BOWEN

A World of Love


What I have always found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.

ELIZABETH BOWEN

The Death of the Heart


Some of my ideas get enlarged almost before I have them.

ELIZABETH BOWEN

The Death of the Heart


There were readers who could expect no more from life, and just dared to look in books to see how much they had missed.

ELIZABETH BOWEN

The Death of the Heart


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


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

ELIZABETH BOWEN

The Death of the Heart


Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

ELIZABETH BOWEN

The House in Paris


First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences, gestures, attitudes, a burning phrase with no context. This isolation, young love and hero worship accomplish without remorse; they hardly know tenderness.

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


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.

ELIZABETH BOWEN

The Death of the Heart