Elizabeth Bowen

She posed as being more indolent than she felt, for fear of finding herself less able than she could wish.

And because no one answered or cared and a conversation went on without her she felt profoundly lonely, suspecting once more for herself a particular doom of exclusion. Something of the trees in their intimacy of shadow was shared by the husband and wife and their host in the tree-shadowed room. She thought of love with its gift of importance. "I must break in on all this," she thought as she looked around the room.

Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone the pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude. She had never landed at Cork, so this hill and that hill beyond were as unexpected as pictures at which you say "Oh look!" Nobody was beside her to share the moment, which would have been imperfect with anyone else there.

Livvy noted there seemed some communal feeling between the married: any wife could be faintly rude to anyone else's husband.

If they should only be ill,' she said, 'there would be so many little things we could do for them. It does seem in a kind of a way an opportunity. I often think it is only when a man is ill that he understands what a woman means in his life.

Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.

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

Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.

One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.

Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.

When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.

In big houses in which things are done properly there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.

Autumn arrives in the early morning but spring at the close of a winter's day.

Experience isn't interesting till it begins to repeat itself-in fact till it does that it hardly is experience.

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

Who ever is adequate? We all create situations which others can't live up to then break our hearts at them because they don't.

If you look at life one way there is always cause for alarm.

Habit is not mere subjugation it is a tender tie when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.