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.

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About Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen CBE (; 7 June 1899 – 22 February 1973) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer notable for her books about the "big house" of Irish landed Protestants as well as her fiction about life in wartime London.

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If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.

—Elizabeth Bowen

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Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.

—Elizabeth Bowen

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Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.

—Elizabeth Bowen

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Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.

—Elizabeth Bowen

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It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.