Author of quotes: Elizabeth Bowen

If the whole world really is a theater, someone should also get the main roles.

There is something ostentatious in despair, and only a very sober mind can recognize in it a grandiose form of cowardice.

Our attachments - let's call them that - our attachments are so instinctive that we are almost unaware of their existence; only when they are compromised, or, worse, when we are compromising them, then we are fully aware of all their power. Betrayal means the end of inner life, without which everyday life turns into either horror or nonsense.

Children's fantasies, as if the scales behind which the bud lurks, not only protect, but also nurture a terrible growing spirit, protect not only innocence from the world, but also the world from the pressure of innocence.

... What a fiction - all this common sense.

When people are treating you badly, you better consider whether someone has mistreated them too.

Sadness certainly knocks the soil out from under a person's feet. Almost immediately, it turns out that the refined art of silence is only suitable for happy days - or for those days when the pain is at least bearable. But as soon as sadness gains full power, this feeling becomes painful, poisonous, any pride perishes under its onslaught.

When you do not really know what will happen tomorrow, then you feel forever out of place.

... Nowadays, every conversation is just a horror, other people's beliefs now and then come to the surface, making people blush.

If there's anything worth learning, it's to endure people who are unbearable right now.

You can break your whole nature, but if you do it quietly, no one will notice. And the point is not even that we are incurious, we simply do not notice someone else's existence.

... Everything hidden needs to be hidden from time to time.

Memory would not part with us so easily, if it were not half-fiction, - we remember only what suits us ...

There is a time in the senses when even the strangest behavior seems reasonable.