Elizabeth Bowen

Some people are molded by their admirations others by their hostilities.

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

With three or more people there is something bold in the air: direct things get said which would frighten two people alone and conscious of each inch of their nearness to one another. To be three is to be in public - you feel safe.

Each of us keeps battened down inside himself a sort of lunatic giant -impossible socially but full-scale. It's the knockings and batterings we sometimes hear in each other that keep our intercourse from utter banality.

Silences have a climax when you have got to speak.

All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted when you find it taken for granted you are unnerved.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

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

Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates it's own objects: is this not also true of fear?

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

He specialized in a particular kind of friendship with that eight-limbed, inscrutable, treacherous creature, the happily married coupe, adapting himself closely and lightly to the composite personality.A peevish dead woman...it's absurd...how much less humiliating for them both it would have been if she had taken a lover.

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

One's sentiments -- call them that -- one's fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: only when they are betrayed or, worse still, when one betrays them does one realize their power.

I swear that each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant - impossible socially, but full-scale - and that it's the knockings and baterrings we sometimes hear in each other that keeps our intercourse from utter banaility.

Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone her pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude.

The way one is envisaged by other people - what easier way is there of envisaging oneself? There is a fatalism in one's acceptance of it. Solitude is not the solution, one feels followed. Choice - choice of those who are to surround one, choice of those most likely to see you rightly - is the only escape.

A romantic man often feels more uplifted with two women than with one: his love seems to hit the ideal mark somewhere between two different faces.

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.... 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.