357 Quotes by Elizabeth Bowen

Good-byes breed a sort of distaste for whomever you say good-bye to; this hurts, you feel, this must not happen again.

Childish fantasy, like the sheath over the bud, not only protects but curbs the terrible budding spirit, protects not only innocence from the world, but the world from the power of innocence.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

She had one of those charming faces which, according to the angle from which you see them, look either melancholy or impertinent. Her eyes were grey; her trick of narrowing them made her seem to reflect, the greater part of the time, in the dusk of her second thoughts. With that mood, that touch of arriere pensee, went an uncertain, speaking set of lips.

Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.

Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.

Ghosts seem harder to please than we are; it is as though they haunted for haunting’s sake -- much as we relive, brood, and smoulder over our pasts.

There's something so showy about desperation, it takes hard wits to see it's a grandiose form of funk.

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.