357 Quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

... it appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy, little is quite impossible.

The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.

The writer, unlike his non-writing adult friend, has no predisposed outlook; he seldom observes deliberately. He sees what he didnot intend to see; he remembers what does not seem wholly possible. Inattentive learner in the schoolroom of life, he keeps some faculty free to veer and wander. His is the roving eye.

There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

Almost everybody wore a curious limpidity of expression, like newborn babies or souls just after death. Dazed but curiously dignified.... after a criseof hysterical revulsion and tiredness, I passed beyondand became entered by a rather sublime feeling.

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.

Ghosts, we hope, may be always with us--that is, never too far out of the reach of fancy. On the whole, it would seem they adapt themselves well, perhaps better than we do, to changing world conditions--they enlarge their domain, shift their hold on our nerves, and, dispossessed of one habitat, set up house in another. The universal battiness of our century looks like providing them with a propitious climate ...