Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

Frankly, I kind of want you to be haunted by the unansweredness of the question, because I think being haunted by such things is a valuable part of being a person.

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.

God is an unutterable sigh, planted in the depths of the soul.

I'm so close to Heaven, this Hell cannot be mine.

My soul is like this cloudy, flaming opal ring.

Lord, I want to be up in my heart.

But I want to pray to Allah. I want to be a Christian.

I fear You and, yes, I love You: and yet I cannot believe. Why could You not let me believe, where so many believed? Or else, why could You not let me deride, as the remainder derided so noisily? O God, why could You not let me have faith? for You gave me no faith in anything, not even in nothingness. It was not fair.

It is excruciating to be an unbeliever with a spirit that is deeply religious.

What parts had she discarded for the sake of her sanity? What had she cut from herself? Had he stared into her pupils he would have emerged, bewildered and blinking, on the far side of the earth. Was he awed by her? Absolutely. Did he respect her? Unequivocally. Want to be anything like her? No, never, not at all.

I feel all shadows of the universe multiplied deep inside my skin.

I want to save my soul, that timid wind.

There's a sea secret in me / it's plain to see it is rising / but I must be flowing liquid diamonds / calling for my soul / at the corners of the world

I agree about Shaw - he is haunted by the mystery he flouts. He is an atheist who trembles in the haunted corridor.

For whatever reason, I have an emotional life that wants to come out.

We want to stay on the straight and narrow path and serve God, yet we continue a practice that often pulls us in the wrong direction.

Whatever is the lot of humankind I want to taste within my deepest self. I want to seize the highest and the lowest, to load its woe and bliss upon my breast, and thus expand my single self titanically and in the end go down with all the rest.

Moses Kaldor had always loved mountains; they made him feel nearer to the God whose nonexistence he still sometimes resented.

That which lives on reason lives against the spirit.

... he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls.

Language is surely too small a vessel to contain these emotions of mind and body that have somehow awakened a response in the spirit.

I fell away from you, my God, and I went astray, too far astray from you, the support of my youth, and I became to myself a land of want.

And when you get an eminent journal like Time magazine complaining, as it often has, that to the young writers of today life seems short on rewards and that what they write is a product of their own neuroses, in its silly way the magazine is merely stating the status quo and obvious truth. The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

The most phlegmatic dispositions often contain the most inflammable spirits, as fire is struck from the hardest flints.