357 Quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant; impossible socially, but full scale; and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.

Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little-even if one did once know what one meant

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

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

My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without - a so-called normal relation to society. My books are my relation to society.

All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.

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

She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her.