Eva Trout Quotes

“The way one is envisaged by other people - what easier way is there of envisaging oneself? There is a fatalism in one's acceptance of it. Solitude is not the solution, one feels followed. Choice - choice of those who are to surround one, choice of those most likely to see you rightly - is the only escape.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, Eva Trout

“The way downhill, into the bottomless incredulity which is despair, was incandescent with flowering chestnut trees.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, Eva Trout

“By habit, she looked round the room she sat in. Anything she could do to it had been done; what it could do to her seemed without limit.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, Eva Trout

“The beautiful agonising mirage of the university was inescapable from. This was a forever she had no part in. The eternity was more real to her for consisting of fiery particles of transience - bridges the punt slid under, raindrops spattering the Cam with vanishing circles, shivered reflections, echoes evaporating, shadows metamorphosizing, distances shifting, glorification coming and going on buildings at a whim of the sun, grass flashing through arches, gasps of primitive breath coming from stones, dusk ebbing from waxen woodwork when doors opened. Holy pillars flowed upward and fountained out, round them being a ceaseless confluence of fanatical colours burningly staining glass. Nothing was at an end, so nothing stood still. And of this living eternity, of its kind and one of its children, had been Henry, walking beside her.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, Eva Trout

“I wonder where father's gone. He repeatedly goes out but never comes in.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, Eva Trout

“The eternal shingle skeined with eternal sand was strung and clotted with dunglike seaweed; bedrabbled seaweed slimed some exposed rocks proceeding outward like stepping-stones to nowhere.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, Eva Trout

“She never foresaw their marriage, its days and nights, other than as embowered by dazzling acres, blossoms a snowy blaze and with honeyed stamens, by sun then moonlight, till came later - fruited boughs bowed, voluptuous, to the ground, gumminess oozing from bloomy plums. She had been a DH Lawrence reader and a townswoman.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, Eva Trout

“Nothing is sudden really.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, Eva Trout

“She abandoned me. She betrayed me.'
'Had you a sapphic relationship?'
"What?"
'Did you exchange embraces of any kind?'
'No. She always was in a hurry?”
― Elizabeth Bowen, Eva Trout

“There's too much of everything, yet nothing.
Is it the world, or what? Everything's hanging over one.
The expectations one's bound to disappoint. The dread of misfiring. The knowing there's something one can't stave off. The Bomb is the least. Look what's got to happen to us if we do live, look at the results! Living is brutalising: just look at everybody!”
― Elizabeth Bowen, Eva Trout