357 Quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland...

Solitary and farouche people don’t have relationships; they are quite unrelatable.

The way one is envisaged by other people – what easier way is there of envisaging oneself? There is a fatalism in one’s acceptance of it. Solitude is not the solution, one feels followed. Choice – choice of those who are to surround one, choice of those most likely to see you rightly – is the only escape.

There must be perfect towns where shadows were strong like buildings, towns secret without coldness, unaware without indifference.

Revenge was a very wild kind of justice...

But surely love wouldn’t get so much talked about if there were not something in it?

People must hope so much when they tear streets up and fight at barricades. But, whoever wins, the streets are laid again and the trams start running again. One hopes too much of destroying things. If revolutions do not fail, they fail you.

And because no one answered or cared and a conversation went on without her she felt profoundly lonely, suspecting once more for herself a particular doom of exclusion. Something of the trees in their intimacy of shadow was shared by the husband and wife and their host in the tree-shadowed room. She thought of love with its gift of importance. “I must break in on all this,” she thought as she looked around the room.

One can suffer a convulsion of one’s entire nature, and, unless it makes some noise, no one notices. It’s not just that we are incurious; we completely lack any sense of each other’s existences.