Elizabeth Bowen People Quotations

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

Education is not so important as people think.

Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.

To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.

People in love, in whom every sense is open, cannot beat off the influence of a place.

Love of privacy - perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society - has become in many people almost pathological.

But complex people are never certain that they are not crooks, never certain their passports are quite in order, and are, therefore, unnerved by the slightest thing.

Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.

I pity people who do not care for Society. They are poorer for the oblation they do not make.

Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable. If you and I were capable of being altogether house-trained and made jolly, we should be nicer people, but not writers.

A novel which survives, which withstands and outlives time, does do something more than merely survive. It does not stand still. It accumulates round itself the understanding of all these persons who bring to it something of their own. It acquires associations, it becomes a form of experience in itself, so that two people who meet can often make friends, find an approach to each other, because of this one great common experience they have had ...

It is in this unearthly first hour of spring twilight that earth's almost agonized livingness is most felt. This hour is so dreadful to some people that they hurry indoors and turn on the lights.

Grown-up people seem to be busy by clockwork... They run their unswerving course from object to object, directed by some mysterious inner needle that points all the time to what they must do next. You can only marvel at such misuse of time.

Two things are terrible in childhood: helplessness (being in other people's power) and apprehension - the apprehension that something is being concealed from us because it is too bad to be told.

Also, perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all.

very young people are true but not resounding instruments.

Dialogue should show the relationships among people.

Certain books come to meet me, as do people.

For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.

Some people are moulded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.

It could've been a disaster for people who couldn't see it on TV, so to speak. The fact that it was incorrect on TV alarmed me.