History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts; it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called ‘eternal.’ What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man.

— Elizabeth Bowen

With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

— Elizabeth Bowen

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.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Also, perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Short of a small range of physical acts-a fight, murder, lovemaking-dialogue is the most vigorous and visible inter-action of which characters in a novel are capable. Speech is what characters do to each other.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Makes of men date, like makes of car.

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Education is not so important as people think.

— Elizabeth Bowen

When I read a story, I relive the moment from which it sprang. A scene burned itself into me, a building magnetized me, a mood orseason of Nature’s penetrated me, history suddenly appeared to me in some tiny act, or a face had begun to haunt me before I glanced at it.

— Elizabeth Bowen
About Stories

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart.

— Elizabeth Bowen

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.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Dialogue should show the relationships among people.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Certain books come to meet me, as do people.

— Elizabeth Bowen
Reading

For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Disappointment tears the bearable film of life.

— Elizabeth Bowen

After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.

— Elizabeth Bowen

All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.

— Elizabeth Bowen
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