357 Quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

Revenge was a very wild kind of justice ...

Short of a small range of physical acts-a fight, murder, lovemaking-dialogue is the most vigorous and visible inter-action of which characters in a novel are capable. Speech is what characters do to each other.

It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.

What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.

The silence of a shut park does not sound like the country silence; it is tense and confined.

The most steady, the most self-sufficient nature depends, more than it knows, on its few chosen stimuli.

Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?

Sins cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life.

It is in this unearthly first hour of spring twilight that earth's almost agonized livingness is most felt. This hour is so dreadful to some people that they hurry indoors and turn on the lights.