Elizabeth bowen

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

Education is not so important as people think.

If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.