No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.
Elizabeth BowenRead
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Absence can distort our perception of friendship, leading us to feel betrayed by those who are not present.
In this quote, Elizabeth Bowen reflects on the idea that when friends are absent, our hearts may attempt to rationalize their absence, but our senses tell us that they fade from our lives. The emotional connection we have with friends can feel severed when they are not physically present, leading to feelings of betrayal and disappointment, regardless of the circumstances that caused their absence.
Themes
FriendshipAbsencePerceptionBetrayalEmotionsConnection
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote in a speech about the impact of long-distance friendships.
More from Elizabeth Bowen
All quotes →Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer's take-down of a 'real life' conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.
Elizabeth BowenRead
When I read a story, I relive the moment from which it sprang. A scene burned itself into me, a building magnetized me, a mood orseason of Nature's penetrated me, history suddenly appeared to me in some tiny act, or a face had begun to haunt me before I glanced at it.
Elizabeth BowenRead
Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.
Elizabeth BowenRead
The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaited him--a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured--captured by some experience to which one may have given hardly a thought.
Elizabeth BowenRead
One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
Elizabeth BowenRead
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