Elizabeth Bowen quotes - page 3

It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home. (Elizabeth Bowen)
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. View quote
Elizabeth Bowen
Good-byes breed a sort of distaste for whomever you say good-bye to this hurts, you feel, this must not happen again. View quote
Elizabeth Bowen
The heart may think it knows better the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart. View quote
Elizabeth Bowen
Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain. View quote
Elizabeth Bowen
Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant - impossible socially, but full-scale - and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our intercourse from utter banality. View quote
Elizabeth Bowen
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. View quote
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. View quote
Elizabeth Bowen
Cicero, in invoking the law of heaven, invoked what was by nature of heaven: law - inviolable principle, better than the vacillating gods. View quote
Elizabeth Bowen