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Famous Elizabeth Bowen Quotes
“I pity people who do not care for Society. They are poorer for the oblation they do not make.”
“When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.”
“Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.”
“We are minor in everything but our passions.”
“Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.”
“Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.”
“Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.”
“Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.”
“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.”
“Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.”
“If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.”
“Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.”
“No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.”
“I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.”
“Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.”
“Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.”
“That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.”
“There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.”
“Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.”
“...there must be something she wanted; and that therefore she was no lady.”