357 Quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

People are most themselves when suddenly woken, or when they pull darkness over their heads, or when, in the middle of the night, they commit themselves to some momentous decision.

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.

It is queer to be in a place when someone has gone. It is not two other places, the place that they were there in, and the place that was there before they came. I can't get used to this third place or to staying behind.

You never quite know when you may hope to repair the damage done by going away.

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.

I swear that each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant - impossible socially, but full-scale - and that it's the knockings and baterrings we sometimes hear in each other that keeps our intercourse from utter banaility.

You agonise me by being so agonised.

She posed as being more indolent than she felt, for fear of finding herself less able than she could wish.

Don't you see we're all full of horrible power, working against each other however much we may love?