Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

“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.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“What you want is the whole of me—isn't it, isn't it?—and the whole of me isn't there for anybody. In that full sense you want me I don't exist.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“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, The Death of the Heart

“You don't much like anything, do you?"

"No, nothing," said Anna, smiling her nice fat malign smile.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“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, The Death of the Heart

“Darling, I don't want you; I've got no place for you; I only want what you give. I don't want the whole of anyone. I haven't wanted to hurt you; I haven't wanted to touch you in any way. When I try and show you the truth I fill you with such despair. Life is so much more impossible than you think.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“Ever since that evening when you gave me my hat, I've been as true to you as I've got it in me to be. Don't force me to where untruth starts. You say nothing would make you hate me. But once make me hate myself and you'd make me hate you.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“You and I are enough to break anyone's heart—how can we not break our own?”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“What I have always found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“You never quite know when you may hope to repair the damage done by going away.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“What do you want me to say?"

"I wish you would say something. Our life goes by without any comment.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“Everything in her life, she could see now, had taken the same turn—as for love, she often puzzled and puzzled, without ever allowing herself to be fully sad, as to what could be wrong with the formula. It does not work, she thought. At times there were moments when she asked herself if she could have been in the wrong: she would almost rather think that. What she thought she regretted was her lack of guard, her wayward extravagance—but had she all the time been more guarded than she imagined, had she been deceitful, had she been seen through? For what had always happened she could still not account. There seemed to be some way she did not know of by which people managed to understand each other.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“You agonise me by being so agonised.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“Look, let's see ourselves in the distance, then we shall think, how happy they are! We're young; this is spring; this is a wood. In some sort of way or other we love each other, and our lives are before us—God pity us! Do you hear the birds?”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“All the days that go by only make me seem to be getting further and further away from the day I last saw Eddie, not nearer and nearer the day I shall see him again.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“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, The Death of the Heart

“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.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“If one didn't let oneself swallow some few lies, I don't know how one would ever carry the past.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“The place gave out a look of hollow desuetude, as though its desertion would last forever.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“While I stand and regard it, the indifference to myself shown by a work of art in itself is art.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, A Time in Rome

“But here I do see how everyone feels."

"I wonder if I like that," said Eddie. "I suspect how people feel, and that seems to me bad enough—I wonder if the truth would be worse or better. The truth, of course I mean, about other people. I know only too well how I feel.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“Don't you see we're all full of horrible power, working against each other however much we may love?”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“He said he judged people by their characters. I said was that always a quite good way of judging, as people's characters get so different at times, as it depends so much what happens to them.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“I cannot say anything about going away. I cannot say anything even in this diary. Perhaps it is better not to say anything ever. I must try not to say anything more to Eddie, when I have said things it has always been a mistake.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“You think I exaggerate."

"At the moment—"

"Well, this sort of moment never really stops . . .”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“To love makes one less clever.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, A Time in Rome

“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.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, A Time in Rome

“Language seldom fails quietly, it fails noisily.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, A Time in Rome

“Sunrise in the Irish Sea, dawn over Dublin Bay
after a stormy night, one shivering star;
and I picture the harsh waking everywhere,
the devastations of a world at war,
airfields, radio silence, a darkened convoy
strung out in moonlight on a glittering sea.”
― Derek Mahon, The Yellow Book