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.

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— 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.

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

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.

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen