357 Quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

A living dog’s better than a dead lion.

Ever since that evening when you gave me my hat, I’ve been as true to you as I’ve got it in me to be. Don’t force me to where untruth starts. You say nothing would make you hate me. But once make me hate myself and you’d make me hate you.

The paradox of romantic love – that what one possesses, one can no longer desire – was at work.

By the rules of fiction, with which life to be credible must comply, he was as a character “impossible” – each time they met, for instance, he showed no shred or trace of having been continuous since they last met.

I am much too influenced by people’s manner towards me – especially Anna’s I suppose. Directly people attack me, I think they are right, and hate myself, and then I hate them – the more I like them this is so.

Look, let’s see ourselves in the distance, then we shall think, how happy they are! We’re young; this is spring; this is a wood. In some sort of way or other we love each other, and our lives are before us – God pity us! Do you hear the birds?

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.

When one is a child, the disposition of objects, tables and chairs and doors, seems part of the natural order: a house-move lets in chaos – as it does for a dog.

No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life – the first twenty years of it – had about them something semi-fictitious.