Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.
Elizabeth BowenWariness had driven away poetry; from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could.
Elizabeth BowenWith 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 BowenGhosts seem harder to please than we are; it is as though they haunted for hauntingโs sake -- much as we relive, brood, and smoulder over our pasts.
Elizabeth Bowen