Quotes by Bowen, Elizabeth

"It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home."

Bowen, Elizabeth on emotions   

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

Bowen, Elizabeth on experience   

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

Bowen, Elizabeth on fate
3 fans of this quote   

"All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved."

Bowen, Elizabeth on greatness   

"Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities."

Bowen, Elizabeth on growth
3 fans of this quote   

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

Bowen, Elizabeth on intimacy   

"Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies."

Bowen, Elizabeth on jealousy
15 fans of this quote   

"Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have."

Bowen, Elizabeth on lies and lying
6 fans of this quote   

"Never to lie is to have no lock to your door, you are never wholly alone."

Bowen, Elizabeth on lies and lying
3 fans of this quote   

"Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting."

Bowen, Elizabeth on art   

"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."

Bowen, Elizabeth on loneliness
6 fans of this quote   

"When you love someone all your saved-up wishes start coming out."

Bowen, Elizabeth on love
23 fans of this quote   

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

Bowen, Elizabeth on love   

"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."

Bowen, Elizabeth on memory   

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

Bowen, Elizabeth on seasons   

"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."

Bowen, Elizabeth on absence
3 fans of this quote   

"Absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends."

Bowen, Elizabeth on absence   

"Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms."

Bowen, Elizabeth on conceit   

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

Bowen, Elizabeth on