Irish-British novelist & short-story writer (1899-1973)
Ghosts seem harder to please than we are; it is as though they haunted for haunting's sake -- much as we relive, brood, and smoulder over our pasts.
ELIZABETH BOWEN
preface, The Second Ghost Book
Looking back at a repetition of empty days, one sees that monuments have sprung up. Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie: when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.
ELIZABETH BOWEN
The Death of the Heart
The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet--when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.
ELIZABETH BOWEN
The Death of the Heart
One does not go into the world and come home the same: isolation has altered its nature when one returns.
ELIZABETH BOWEN
A World of Love
It is queer to be in a place when someone has gone. It is not two other places, the place that they were there in, and the place that was there before they came. I can't get used to this third place or to staying behind.
ELIZABETH BOWEN
The Death of the Heart
Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.
ELIZABETH BOWEN
The House in Paris
When you love someone, all your saved-up wishes start coming out.
ELIZABETH BOWEN
A World of Love
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.
ELIZABETH BOWEN
Collected Impressions
Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.
ELIZABETH BOWEN
The House in Paris
To seek pleasure makes a hero of anyone: you open yourself so entirely to fate.
ELIZABETH BOWEN
The House in Paris
Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.
ELIZABETH BOWEN
The Death of the Heart
Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.
ELIZABETH BOWEN
The House in Paris
What I have always found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.
ELIZABETH BOWEN
The Death of the Heart
If one didn't let oneself swallow some few lies, I don't know how one would ever carry the past.
ELIZABETH BOWEN
The Death of the Heart
Some of my ideas get enlarged almost before I have them.
ELIZABETH BOWEN
The Death of the Heart
Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
ELIZABETH BOWEN
The House in Paris
There were readers who could expect no more from life, and just dared to look in books to see how much they had missed.
ELIZABETH BOWEN
The Death of the Heart
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. This isolation, young love and hero worship accomplish without remorse; they hardly know tenderness.
ELIZABETH BOWEN
The House in Paris
Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.
ELIZABETH BOWEN
The Heat of the Day
Who is ever adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't.
ELIZABETH BOWEN
The Death of the Heart