Quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

“Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.”

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

“Who is ever adequate? We all create situations each other cant live up to, then break our hearts at them because they dont.”

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

“We are minor in everything but our passions”

“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.”

“Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies”

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

“Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.”

“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”

“The silence often of pure innocence persuades when speaking fails.”

“Truth is something which cant be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.”

“In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.”

“Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure”

A romantic man often feels more uplifted with two women than with one: his love seems to hit the ideal mark somewhere between two different faces.

If they should only be ill, she said, there would be so many little things we could do for them. It does seem in a kind of a way an opportunity. I often think it is only when a man is ill that he understands what a woman means in his life.

Livvy noted there seemed some communal feeling between the married: any wife could be faintly rude to anyone elses husband.

Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone the pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude. She had never landed at Cork, so this hill and that hill beyond were as unexpected as pictures at which you say Oh look! Nobody was beside her to share the moment, which would have been imperfect with anyone else there.

And because no one answered or cared and a conversation went on without her she felt profoundly lonely, suspecting once more for herself a particular doom of exclusion. Something of the trees in their intimacy of shadow was shared by the husband and wife and their host in the tree-shadowed room. She thought of love with its gift of importance. I must break in on all this, she thought as she looked around the room.

She posed as being more indolent than she felt, for fear of finding herself less able than she could wish.