357 Quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

His experiences and hers became harder and harder to tell apart; everything gathered behind them into a common memory – though singly each of them might, must, exist, decide, act; all things done alone came to be no more than a simulcra of behaviour: they waited to live again till they were together... Every love has a poetic relevance of its own...

On the subject of dress almost no one, for one or another reason, feels truly indifferent: if their own clothes do not concern them, somebody else’s do.

The way downhill, into the bottomless incredulity which is despair, was incandescent with flowering chestnut trees.

You and I are enough to break anyone’s heart – how can we not break our own?

By habit, she looked round the room she sat in. Anything she could do to it had been done; what it could do to her seemed without limit.

Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft...

Autumn arrives in the early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.

First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences, gestures, attitudes, a burning phrase with no context

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