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

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

— Elizabeth Bowen

"What's the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually— our sense of personality is a sense of outrage and we'll never get outside of it."But the hold of the country was that, she considered, it could be thought of in terms of oneself, so interpreted.

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

This is the worst of love, this unmeant mystification — someone smiling and going out without saying where, or a letter arriving, being read in your presence, put away, not explained, or: "No, alas, I can't to-night" on the telephone — that, one person having set up without knowing, the other cannot undo without the where? who? why? that brings them both down a peg. Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

— Elizabeth Bowen

And yet in a way I would rather fail point blank. Things one can do have no value. I don't mind feeling small myself, but I dread finding the world is.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself — in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.

— Elizabeth Bowen

The heart may think it knows better: The senses know that absence blots people out. We have really no absent friends.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Intimacies between women go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending up in small talk without loss of esteem.

— Elizabeth Bowen

[T]here is a flaw in civilization from the instant it has to admit fear.

— Elizabeth Bowen

[U]ntruths are thieves, robbing us of a birthright.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Cicero, in invoking the law of heaven, invoked what was by nature of heaven: law — inviolable principle, better than the vacillating gods.

— Elizabeth Bowen

It is thought that women inspire by their beauty; more often they do so by their longings.

— Elizabeth Bowen

I am sick of the governessy attitude of our age, which is coming to be more genuinely presumptuous, nosier and more busybody than the Victorian.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

— Elizabeth Bowen

One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen