Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
Elizabeth BowenMemory must be patchy; what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out - unique to oneself, one's own, one's claim to identity, it implicates one's identity in its fibbing.
Elizabeth BowenTwo things are terrible in childhood: helplessness (being in other people's power) and apprehension - the apprehension that something is being concealed from us because it is too bad to be told.
Elizabeth Bowen[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.
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 Bowen