Elizabeth Bowen

Who was Elizabeth Bowen?

Elizabeth Bowen, CBE was an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer.

Famous Quotes:

• Absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
• Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.
• When you love someone all your saved-up wishes start coming out.
• All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.
• Intimacies between women go backwards, beginning with revelations and ending up in small talk without loss of esteem.
• Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
• The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart.
• Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.
• Never to lie is to have no lock to your door, you are never wholly alone.
• Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.