Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

No one welcomes chaos, but why crave stability and predictability?

You know, small children take it as a matter of course that things will change every day and grown-ups understand that things change sooner or later and their job is to keep them from changing as long as possible. It’s only kids in high school who are convinced they’re never going to change. There’s always going to be a pep rally and there’s always going to be a spectator bus, somewhere out there in their future.

I really don't know what to do when my life is not chaotic.

Progress everywhere today does seem to come so very heavily disguised as Chaos.

If you stop being scared, that's when entropy sets in, and you may as well go home.

Ideas govern the world, or throw it into chaos.

Routine is not organization, any more than paralysis is order.

I went to 11 different schools. It was a fantastic adventure, but I was incredibly sensitive and needed a bit more stability.

In an upside down world, with all the rules being rewritten as the game goes on and spectators invading the pitch, it is good to feel that some things and some people seem to stay just as they were.

I always wanted to know what I'd face next, even though that was maybe a bit detrimental to spontaneity. Structuring my life and avoiding chaos was more important.

I feel like I've always wanted to live in one place and stay in one place, but I always end up choosing things that make me travel.

A child wants some kind of undisrupted routine or rhythm. He seems to want a predictable, orderly world.

Life is nothing without a little chaos to make it interesting.

Adolescents are travelers, far from home with no native land, neither children nor adults. They are jet-setters who fly from one country to another with amazing speed. Sometimes they are four years old, an hour later they are twenty-five. They don't really fit anywhere. There's a yearning for place, a search for solid ground.

A body without bones would be a limp impossible mess, so a day without steady routine would be disruptive and chaotic.

Imagine a world where nothing is stable. In the West, we have three moving elements -- Air, Fire, Water -- but at least we can depend on the fourth.

The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?

We no longer even understand the question whether change is by itself good or bad, ...We start out with the axiom that it is the norm. We do not see change as altering the order... We see change as being order itself - indeed the only order we can comprehend today is a dynamic, a moving, a changing one.

Unless you move, the place where you are is the place where you will always be.

Sometimes you need to make a mess. -Loretta, the Rollinses' hosekeeper

Pully, hauly, tug with a will; the gods wiggle waggle, but the sky stands still.

Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.

Axiom: you are a sea. Your eye- lids curve over chaos My hands where they touch you, create small inhabited islands soon you will be all earth: a known land, a country.

Clouds out of control decoct anticipation. What use can any of us have for two moons? The miracle of order has run out and I am left in an unmiraculous city where anything may happen.

If only,’ Shiroyama dreams, ‘human beings were not masks behind masks behind masks. If only this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders.