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Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.

Elizabeth Bowen

Fate

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

The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.

Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.

Elizabeth Bowen

Experience

Fact

When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.

Elizabeth Bowen

Love

Wishes

There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved is part of one's self-respect.

Elizabeth Bowen

Feeling

Self

Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.

Elizabeth Bowen

Lie

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

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.

Elizabeth Bowen

Effort

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

Elizabeth Bowen

Nothing

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

Elizabeth Bowen

Eye

Mystery

The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.

Elizabeth Bowen

Lie

Victims

Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.

Elizabeth Bowen

Truth

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