357 Quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

Silences can be as different as sounds.

Story involves action. Action towards an end not to be foreseen (by the reader) but also towards an end which, having been reached, must be seen to have been from the start inevitable.

We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.

... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.

Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.

Love of privacy - perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society - has become in many people almost pathological.

Nothing, that is say no one, can be such an inexorable tour-conductor as one's own conscience or sense of duty, if one allows either the upper hand: the self-bullying that goes on in the name of sight-seeing is grievous.

Love of privacy – perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society – has become in many people almost pathological.

Solitary and farouche people don’t have relationships; they are quite unrelatable. If you and I were capable of being altogether house-trained and made jolly, we should be nicer people, but not writers.