Roughly, the action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown. In the first half of a novel, the unpredictability should be the more striking. In the second half, the inevitability should be the more striking.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Firsts

Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

That Sunday, from six o’clock in the evening, it was a Viennese orchestra that played.

— Elizabeth Bowen

What’s in your mind, I suppose, is, why should you rise to occasions when I don’t? Let’s face it – who ever is adequate? We all create situations each other can’t live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don’t.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Did Anna also, sometimes not know what to do next? Because she knew what to do next, because she knew what to laugh at, what to say, did it always follow that she knew where to turn? Inside everyone, is there an anxious person who stands to hesitate in an empty room?

— Elizabeth Bowen

There must be perfect towns where shadows were strong like buildings, towns secret without coldness, unaware without indifference.

— Elizabeth Bowen

If one didn’t let oneself swallow some few lies, I don’t know how one would ever carry the past.

— Elizabeth Bowen

The place gave out a look of hollow desuetude, as though its desertion would last forever.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little, even if one did once know what one meant.

— Elizabeth Bowen

The happy passive nature, locked up with itself like a mirror in an airy room, reflects what goes on but demands not to be approached. A pact with life, a pact of immunity, appears to exist-But this pact is not respected for ever- a street accident, an overheard quarrel, a certain note in a voice, a face coming too close, a tree being blown down, someone’s unjust fate- the peace tears right across.

— Elizabeth Bowen

There were readers who could expect no more from life, and just dared to look in books to see how much they had missed.

— Elizabeth Bowen

There are still places I cannot walk past, though we only walked here those two days. When I walk I look for places we did not go.

— Elizabeth Bowen

I wonder where father’s gone. He repeatedly goes out but never comes in.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Frantic smiles at parties, overtures that have desperation behind them, miasmic reaches of talk with the lost bore, short cuts to approach through staring, squeezing or kissing all indicate that one cannot live alone. Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.

— Elizabeth Bowen

You agonise me by being so agonised.

— Elizabeth Bowen

While I stand and regard it, the indifference to myself shown by a work of art in itself is art.

— Elizabeth Bowen

Society was self-interest given a pretty gloss.

— Elizabeth Bowen

We observe small rites, but we defend ourselves against that terrible memory that is stronger than will. We defend ourselves from the rooms, the scenes, the objects that make for hallucination, that make the senses start up and fasten upon a ghost. We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.

— Elizabeth Bowen

One does not go into the world and come home the same: isolation has altered its nature when one returns.

— Elizabeth Bowen

But I should never write what had happened down. One’s nature is to forget, and one ought to go by that. Memory is quite unbearable enough, but even so it leaves out quite a lot. It wouldn’t let one down as gently.

— Elizabeth Bowen

It’s not just that we are incurious; we completely lack any sense of each other’s existences.

— Elizabeth Bowen

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