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

Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
Elizabeth Bowen

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

Education is not so important as people think.
Elizabeth Bowen

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

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

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

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

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

If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.
Elizabeth Bowen


If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
Elizabeth Bowen

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

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

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

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

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
Elizabeth Bowen

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
Elizabeth Bowen

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

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

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