Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

What seems conceit, bad manners or cynicism is always a sign of things no ear have heard, no eyes have seen. You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.

There are hundreds of thousands of kids walking around with a sleeping monster inside them.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

We've all got darkness inside us. And I've got quite a lot of darkness.

I am always fascinated by the mental struggles that people and characters have.

Fighting the ongoing war in your day-to-day life, everybody has their battle going on that nobody else knows about.

We all - if we are honest with ourselves, we all have these dark spaces within our souls that we don't always want to talk about or acknowledge.

And all that weirdness isn't just going on outside. It's in you too, right now, growing in the dark like magic mushrooms. Call it the Thing in the Cellar. Call it the Blow Lunch Factor. Call it the Loony Tunes File. I think of it as my private dinosaur, huge, slimy, and mindless, stumbling around in the stinking swamp of my subconscious, never finding a tar pit big enough to hold it.

With subtle and finely-wrought temperaments it is always so. Their strong passions must either bruise or bend. They either slay the man, or themselves die. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and the sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.

You know what the really scary thing about bad dreams? It's that something's going on in your head, and you can't control it. I mean, It's like there's these bad worlds inside you. But it's just you... it's like you're betraying yourself.

It takes too much imagination to see the sorrows of people we take for happy. Their real battles take place, like those of the stars, in some realm of light imperceptible to the human eye. It is a feat of the mind to guess another's heart.

To be an actor you have to have a certain amount of madness in you. That’s why, when people meet you and you seem very together, they are quite surprised - they don’t see you behind closed doors.

A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.

I balance things better and don't kill myself so much, but conflict makes me a more interesting actress to watch. The places I go to pull emotions from, I think if you have a perfect, happy life, you just don't have those places. And I want those places. I'm proud of those places.

It is within you that the ghosts acquire voices.

When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears.

Have compassion for everyone you meet, even if they don't want it. What seems conceit, bad manners, or cynicism is a sign of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen. You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.

I swim in a pool of my own neurosis. I carry love, grief deeply, like an Irishman.

We cannot possibly imagine the variety of contradictions in every heart.

Hatred makes me energetic, but confused.

There's such a fierce intense fire burning inside of me, so much that it just wants to explode.

And he wishes, in the cold quiet of his archer's heart, that he himself could feel the intensity of their reconciliations as strongly as he feels that of their battles.

Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.

There is not one among us in whom a devil does not dwell; at some time, on some point, that devil masters each of us... It is not having been in the Dark House, but having left it, that counts.

My face too blind, my mind too limited, my instincts too narrow. But this intensity, doesn't it mean anything?