ELIZABETH BOWEN

Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

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

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

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

We are minor in everything but our passions.

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

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

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.

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.

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

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

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

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.

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

Education is not so important as people think.

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

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

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.

Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.

It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.

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