No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
Elizabeth Bowen

Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
Elizabeth Bowen

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

Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
Elizabeth Bowen

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

Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.
Elizabeth Bowen

Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
Elizabeth Bowen

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
Elizabeth Bowen

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.
Elizabeth Bowen

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
Elizabeth Bowen

The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.
Elizabeth Bowen

The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.
Elizabeth Bowen

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.
Elizabeth Bowen

There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.
Elizabeth Bowen

We are minor in everything but our passions.
Elizabeth Bowen

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

Who is ever adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't.
Elizabeth Bowen