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

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
- Elizabeth Bowen Quote

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

Education is not so important as people think.
- Elizabeth Bowen Quote

Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.
- Elizabeth Bowen Quote

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

Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.
- Elizabeth Bowen Quote

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.
- Elizabeth Bowen Quote

I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.
- Elizabeth Bowen Quote

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

Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk without loss of esteem.
- Elizabeth Bowen Quote

Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
- Elizabeth Bowen Quote

Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
- Elizabeth Bowen Quote

It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.
- Elizabeth Bowen Quote

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
- Elizabeth Bowen Quote

Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.
- Elizabeth Bowen Quote

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

Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.
- Elizabeth Bowen Quote

Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
- Elizabeth Bowen Quote

One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
- Elizabeth Bowen Quote

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

The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.
- Elizabeth Bowen Quote

The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.
- Elizabeth Bowen Quote

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

We are minor in everything but our passions.
- Elizabeth Bowen Quote

When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.
- Elizabeth Bowen Quote