There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone. – Elizabeth Bowen
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart. – Elizabeth Bowen
Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope it is impossible. – Elizabeth Bowen
Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk. – Elizabeth Bowen
We advance in years somewhat in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as the saying goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep open communications with the extreme rear and first beginnings of the march. – Robert Louis Stevenson, “Virginibus Puerisque II,” Virginibus Puerisque, 1881