Elizabeth Bowen

"It is a wary business, walking about a strange house you are to know well. Only cats and dogs with their more expressive bodies enact the tension we share with them at such times. The you inside you g…"

"This is the worst of love, this unmeant mystification — someone smiling and going out without saying where, or a letter arriving, being read in your presence, put away, not explained, or: "No, alas, I…"

"Cicero, in invoking the law of heaven, invoked what was by nature of heaven: law — inviolable principle, better than the vacillating gods."

"here is a flaw in civilization from the instant it has to admit fear."

"I am sick of the governessy attitude of our age, which is coming to be more genuinely presumptuous, nosier and more busybody than the Victorian."

"ntruths are thieves, robbing us of a birthright."

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

"Intimacies between women go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending up in small talk without loss of esteem."