Elizabeth Bowen Quotations

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

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

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

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

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

Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.

Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.

I am dead against art's being self-expression. I see an inherent failure in any story which fails to detach itself from the author-detach itself in the sense that a well-blown soap-bubble detaches itself from the bowl of the blower's pipe and spherically takes off into the air as a new, whole, pure, iridescent world. Whereas the ill-blown bubble, as children know, timidly adheres to the bowl's lip, then either bursts or sinks flatly back again.

We have really no absent friends.

Young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate; they like to have loud chords struck on them.