Elizabeth Bowen Love Quotes and Sayings, Photo credit: Wikipedia
Elizabeth Bowen Love Quotes and Sayings
#1 The Death of the Heart [S]
1. …when you love someone all your saved-up wishes start coming out.
#2 The Death of the Heart [S]
2. Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.
#3 The Death of the Heart [S]
3. The wish to lead out one’s lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved is part of one’s self-respect.
#4 The Death of the Heart [S]
4. One doesn’t have to be in love to be silly—in fact I think one is sillier when one’s not in love, because then one makes a thing about everything.
#5 The House in Paris [S]
5. 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.
#6 The House in Paris [S]
6. People in love, in whom every sense is open, cannot beat off the influence of a place.
#7 The Heat of the Day [S]
7. Every love has a poetic relevance of its own; each love brings to light only what to it is relevant. Outside lies the junk-yard of what does not matter.
#8 The Heat of the Day [S]
8. Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.
#9 The Heat of the Day [S]
9. …love dreads being isolated, being left to speak in a void — at the beginning it would often rather listen than speak.
#10 The Art of Bergotte, Pictures and Conversations [S]
10. The paradox of romantic love—that what one possesses, one can no longer desire—was at work.
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Excerpt from Wikipedia: Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen, CBE (7 June 1899 – 22 February 1973) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer. Bowen was born in Dublin and later brought to Bowen’s Court in County Cork where she spent her summers. When her father became mentally ill in 1907, she and her mother moved to England, eventually settling in Hythe. After her mother died in 1912, Bowen was brought up by her aunts.
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Sayings by Elizabeth Bowen
#1 The Death of the Heart [S]
1. 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.
#2 The Death of the Heart [S]
2. It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home. The need to attach themselves makes wandering people strike roots in a day: wherever we unconsciously feel, we live.
#3 The Death of the Heart [S]
3. …autumn arrives in the early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
#4 The Death of the Heart [S]
4. Experience isn’t interesting till it begins to repeat itself—in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.
#5 The Death of the Heart [S]
5. If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
#6 The Death of the Heart [S]
6. The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We have really no absent friends.
#7 The Death of the Heart [S]
7. For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realisation is something of an ordeal. Expectations are the most perilous form of dream, and when dreams do realise themselves it is in the waking world: the difference is subtly but often painfully felt.
#8 The Death of the Heart [S]
8. We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.
#9 The House in Paris [S]
9. Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
#10 The House in Paris [S]
10. Never to lie is to have no lock to your door, you are never wholly alone.
#11 The House in Paris [S]
11. …all your youth, you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
#12 The House in Paris [S]
12. Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one’s outlook; it only confirms one’s idea that one is unique.
#13 The House in Paris [S]
13. Nobody speaks the truth when there’s something they must have.
#14 The Heat of the Day [S]
14. Also in my experience one thing you don’t learn from is anything anyway set up to be a lesson; what you are to know you pick up as you go along.
#15 Essays: ‘Out of a Book’, The Mulberry Tree [S]
15. Though not all reading children grow up to be writers, I take it that most creative writers must in their day have been reading children.
#16 Broadcasts: ‘Anthony Trollope: A New Judgement’, The Mulberry Tree [S]
16. Some say that to be a father’s an education—you may quite often recognize, in your children, bits of yourself you had never known were there.
#17 Preface, Stories by Elizabeth Bowen, Vintage Books [S]
17. The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.
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Unsourced Quotes by by Elizabeth Bowen
1. It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.