The House in Paris Quotes

“Never to lie is to have no lock to your door, you are never wholly alone”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone her pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“You could see that her tremendous inside life, its solitary fears and fires, was out of accord with her humble view of herself; to hide or excuse what she felt was her first wish.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“...there must be something she wanted; and that therefore she was no lady.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“People must hope so much when they tear streets up and fight at barricades. But, whoever wins, the streets are laid again and the trams start running again. One hopes too much of destroying things. If revolutions do not fail, they fail you.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“She was in that flagging mood when to go on living seems only to load more unmeaning moments on to your memory.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“You must show him your monkey: I am sure he will like that.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“You know, even grown-up people cannot do what they want most"
"Then why grow up?”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences, gestures, attitudes, a burning phrase with no context. This isolation, young love and hero worship accomplish without remorse; they hardly know tenderness.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“It is a wary business, walking about a strange house you know 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 gathers up defensively; something is stealing upon you every moment; you will never be the same again.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“Their hands, swinging, touched lightly now and then; their nearness was as natural as the June day.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“The inside of the house – with its shallow door-panels, lozenge door-knobs, polished brass ball on the end of the banisters, stuffy red matt paper with stripes to artfully shadowed as to appear bars – was more than simply novel to Henrietta, it was antagonistic, as though it had been invented to put her out. She felt the house was acting, nothing seemed to be natural; objects did not wait to be seen but came crowding in on her, each with what amounted to its aggressive cry.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“Grown-up people seem to be busy by clockwork: even when someone is not ill, when there has been no telegram, 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.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“Young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate; they like to have loud chords struck upon them. Loving art better than life they need men to be actors; only an actor moves them, with his telling smile, undomestic, out of touch with the everyday that they dread. They love to enjoy love as a system of doubts and shocks. They are right; not seeking husbands yet, they have no reason to see love socially.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“Spezia offered Leopold almost nothing: his precocity devoured itself there, rejecting the steep sunny coast and nibbling blue edge of the sea that had drowned Shelley. His spirit became crustacean under douches of culture and mild philosophic chat from his Uncle Dee, who was cultured rather than erudite.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“At Spezia when I am angry I go full of smoke inside, but when you make me angry I see everything.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“People in love, in whom every sense is open, cannot beat off the influence of a place.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“Leopold was not even interested in hurting, and was only tweaking her petals off or her wings off with the intention of exploring himself. His dispassionateness was more dire, to Henrietta, than cruelty. With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“Good-byes breed a sort of distaste for whomever you say good-bye to; this hurts, you feel, this must not happen again. Any other meeting will only lead back to this.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“For God's sake, is there no plain man?”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“To foresee pleasures makes anybody a poet...to seek pleasure makes a hero of anyone: you open yourself so entirely to fate.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“Henrietta knew of the heart as an organ; she privately saw it covered in red plush and believed that it could not break, though it might tear.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“Plot might seem to be a matter of choice. It is not. The particular plot is something the novelist is driven to: it is what is left after the whittling-away of alternatives.' Elizabeth Bowen opened her Notes on Writing a Novel (1945, reprinted in Collected Impressions, Longmans, Green & Co.,”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

“Love is obtuse and reckless; it interferes.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris