All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
– Elizabeth Bowen
Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
– Elizabeth Bowen
Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.
– Elizabeth Bowen
Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.
– Elizabeth Bowen
Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
– Elizabeth Bowen
It is in this unearthly first hour of spring twilight that earth's almost agonized livingness is most felt. This hour is so dreadful to some people that they hurry indoors and turn on the lights.
– Elizabeth Bowen
It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
– Elizabeth Bowen
It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.
– Elizabeth Bowen
No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
– Elizabeth Bowen
Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
– Elizabeth Bowen
Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.
– Elizabeth Bowen
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
– Elizabeth Bowen
There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.
– Elizabeth Bowen
We are minor in everything but our passions.
– Elizabeth Bowen
When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.
– Elizabeth Bowen
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 charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy and temperamental; it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.
– Elizabeth Bowen
If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
– Elizabeth Bowen
Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.
– Elizabeth Bowen
Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.
– Elizabeth Bowen
Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope it is impossible.
– Elizabeth Bowen
Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.
– Elizabeth Bowen
Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
– Elizabeth Bowen
Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
– Elizabeth Bowen
Education is not so important as people think.
– Elizabeth Bowen
Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.