The Death of the Heart

by Elizabeth Bowen

The agitation of seeing something quite unexpected often makes one think it worse than it is.”

She was sixteen, losing her childish majesty.

“We are minor in everything but our passions.”

Those without memories don’t know what is what.”

At the cinema they felt loverlike;

The ironical thing is that everyone else gets their knives into us bourgeoisie on the assumption we’re having a good time.

we are both rather wicked or rather innocent.

“When that’s done, you’re going to start another?” “Oh yes, I think so: things are always happening.” “But suppose you stopped minding whether they did?”

This house makes a smell of feeling.

Unwritten poetry twists the hearts of people in their thirties.

She had yet to learn how often intimacies between women go backwards, beginning with revelations and ending up in small talk without loss of esteem.

Some people are moulded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.

When these young people stopped doing what they were doing, they stopped all through, like clocks.

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.

For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realisation is something of an ordeal. Expectations are the most perilous form of dream, and when dreams do realise themselves it is in the waking world: the difference is subtly but often painfully felt.

Not a scrap of policy underlay his manner.

she was the only person to whom he need not pretend that she had not ceased existing when, for him, she had ceased to exist.

No presence could be less insistent than hers. He treated her like an element (air, for instance) or a condition (darkness): these touch one with their equality and lightness where one could endure no human touch. He could look right through her, without a flicker of seeing,

“For such a little girl, you know, you’re neurotic.”

I may be a crook but I’m not a fake—that is an entirely different thing.”

“Well, don’t just fidget about: it drives anyone crazy.”

Pictures would not be hung plumb over the centres of fireplaces or wallpapers pasted on with such precision that their seams make no break in the pattern if life were really not possible

When I try and show you the truth I fill you with such despair. Life is so much more impossible than you think.

You and I are enough to break anyone’s heart—how can we not break our own?

How many of these letters were impulses, how many were steps in some careful plan?

We all create situations each other can’t live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don’t.

And she and I feel so shy, and shyness makes one so brutal….No,

There seemed to be some way she did not know of by which people managed to understand each other.

One’s nature is to forget, and one ought to go by that. Memory is quite unbearable enough, but even so it leaves out quite a lot.

if one didn’t let oneself swallow some few lies, I don’t know how one would ever carry the past.

All the time, you go making connections—and that can be a vice.”

What is unfair is, that you hide. God’s spy, and so on.

You ought to want some key to why people do what they do.

policy. Because I quite like Anna, I overlook much in her, and because she quite likes me she overlooks much in me. We laugh at each other’s jokes and we save each other’s faces—When I give her away to you, I break an accepted rule. This is not often done.

with me there has to be quite a brainstorm before I break any rule, before speaking the truth. Love, drink, anger—something crumbles the whole scene:

immunity—the immunity of sleep, of anæsthesia, of endless solitude, the immunity of the journey

Destroy tradition, and you destroy the sense of responsibility.”

Does it make one more nearly good and happy to be thought good and happy?

The aristocratic privilege of silence belongs, you soon find out, to only the happy state—or, at least, to the state when pain keeps within bounds.

you and I are the first people who have ever been us.”

You’ve got a completely lunatic set of values, and a sort of unfailing lunatic instinct that makes you pick on another

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

I don’t say it has changed the course of my life, but it’s given me a rather more disagreeable feeling about being alive—or, at least, about being me.”

“What proof have you,” said Thomas, breaking in for the first time “that much nicer people do really exist?”

I swear that each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant—impossible