Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

Ghosts don't haunt people--their memories do.

The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of memory.

I'd trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday.

The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment.

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought.

When a man or woman loves to brood over a sorrow and takes care to keep it green in their memory, you may be sure it is no longer a pain to them.

Maybe before you die, it's your ghosts you see.

In vain would I seek to discover Why sad and mournful am I, My thoughts without ceasing brood over A tale of the time gone by.

The discontented believe that their regrets are about the past.

Ah, tell me not that memory sheds gladness o'er the past, what is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?

I think people live in the past and tend to look that way, because they drop off when they're happiest and most successful.

We all look for lost time.

I wish we'd never got divorced. He and I both wish we'd never got divorced, but we did. I wish I could go back and be the bride again, but I can't.

There are many things that I feel I have missed out on.

And I've been walking 'round with memories way too long.

Anyone who doesn't miss the past never had a mother.

Nostalgia is not what it used to be.

I'm not the sort to wallow in nostalgia about the good old days.

People look to you to replace a part in their lives that they can't get back. You can't get the past back, you can't do it. We've all tried.

Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.

There's no sustenance in the past.

I'm just fascinated by the past. You know, both by the possibilities it holds and by the complete tyranny of it, the way it sort of keeps you in this stranglehold and makes you want things that you no longer have and you can never get back.

I don't have a great nostalgia for the past.

I think childhood is to everyone a lost land.

I don't much like looking back.