Bowen Quotes

It is in this unearthly first hour of spring twilight that earth's almost agonized livingness is most felt. This hour is so dreadful to some people that they hurry indoors and turn on the lights. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

You haven't stammered and stuttered in a while now that I think about." A grin stretches his sexy mouth. "Could someone finally be warming up to me?"
I warmed up to you the day we met. I melted for you the second you kissed me. ~ Sarina Bowen

If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

Nothing is more restful than conformity. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

He doesn't move.

Please, I beg him inwardly.

Please go up to bed.

It's hard enough to look at his face each day and not feel heartbreak. I can't be close to him right now. I'm afraid I'll give in and kiss him again. The way his hard body had aligned so perfectly with mine is burned in my consciousness. I'll be trying not to remember that for weeks.

I wait, and I ache.

Finally the door clicks open. I hear him exit the car. When the door slams shut, I feel it like a sledgehammer to the heart.

Don't look, I coach myself.

But my self-control isn't infinite. His fair hair glints under the streetlight as his long legs eat up the walkway in just a few paces. Seeing him walk away from me splinters something inside me. ~ Sarina Bowen

Excuse me, Ben," Bowen said. "Am I wrong, or aren't you the corporate treasurer?"
Glisan bristled. "Yes."
"What do you mean, you think you can get one?" Bowen shot back. "This is the current fucking maturities schedule! Go get it. You have to have a maturities schedule!"
But they didn't. With all the focus on deals and earnings- with finance group's transformation into a profit center rather than a division to support the business- the workday, boring details had been sloughed off.
p. 560 ~ Kurt Eichenwald

The question now isn't whether I want to fool around with this man. The question is how I'm ever going to give it up. ~ Sarina Bowen

They don't hang dukes, darling. He'd be let off by reason of insanity. Everyone knows the upper classes are batty. ~ Rhys Bowen

And then there's the perverse joy of subtly working in references to marathon training in daily life, say at the post office or while waiting outside my first-graders' classrooms at the end of the school day. ~ Sarah Bowen Shea

What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

To meditate, stew, and brew on too many negative thoughts, distorts and super-sizes offenses and causes anger. ~ Stephen L. Bowen

History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts; it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called 'eternal.' What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

There is no doubt that sorrow brings one down in the world. The aristocratic privilege of silence belongs, you soon find out, to only the happy state- or, at least, to the state when pain keeps within bounds. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

Reddish-brown hair worn shaggy, as if he simply didn't care about style. Which was baffling. Really, what sort of educated man didn't care about style? ~ Kelly Bowen

A living dog's better than a dead lion. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

To be fair, I don't think it's a plague to say I have the misfortune of making movies for a living. ~ A. J. Bowen

Our mouths meet in another kiss. Soft this time. Agonizingly slow. It's not enough. I'll stop it soon, any second now, but not yet. Not until he gives me more. ~ Sarina Bowen

Almost everyone admits to hunger during the Opera ... Hunger is so exalting that during a last act you practically levitate. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

I reach around his body and cup his ass. When my hand finds the toy lodged there, I groan into his mouth. "Do it," he pants. Everything begins to happen very fast. With a firm grasp, I remove the toy, while Wes slicks up my dick. He yanks me off the sofa's back and braces himself against it. "Go," he orders. I come up behind him and grip his hips, the head of my cock sliding between his taut ass cheeks. Just like the other night, I'm floored by the sensation of being skin to skin. There's no barrier between my throbbing dick and his tight ass, and when I drive deep on the first stroke, we both groan with abandon. "Fuck me," he demands when I go still. But I'm too busy savoring the incredible feeling of being inside him without a condom. I roll my hips and he growls like a grumpy bear. "I swear to God, Canning, if you don't move, I'm gonna - " I pull out, then slam right back in. He makes a choked sound, his entire body trembling. "You're gonna what?" I ask mockingly. ~ Sarina Bowen

It is a great, a pleasant thing to have a friend with whom to walk, untroubled, through the woods, by the stream, saying nothing, at peace
the heart all clean and quiet and empty, ready for the spirit that may choose to be its guest. ~ Catherine Drinker Bowen

Give me the D. You know you want to. ~ Sarina Bowen

Dude, it's not like you tied me to the bed and forced yourself on me. I don't know if you remember, but I came like a motherfucker that night." Aw shit. I don't know why I said that. And the flash of heat that travels down to my dick is equally perplexing. Thinking about that night is something I rarely let myself do. It was easily the hottest sexual experience eighteen-year-old Jamie Canning had ever had. But remembering it always confuses me, because I associate it with getting banished from the friendship I valued most. ~ Sarina Bowen

Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

Thank you, Scarlet".
"For what? For being your Tuesday and Thursday girl?"
"For all seven days. Because I think of you on all of them". ~ Sarina Bowen

Darkness is the absence of light. Happiness is the absence of pain. Anger is the absence of joy. Jealousy is the absence of confidence. Love is the absence of doubt. Hate is the absence of peace. Fear is the absence of faith. Life is the absence of death. ~ Jess Bowen

Time for reflection and interaction is a casualty of the digital age, and one of the primary goals of higher education should be to reclaim this time. ~ Jose Antonio Bowen

But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it? ~ Elizabeth Bowen

She hums. And when she lifts her gaze to look me in the eye, it's a challenge not to humiliate myself.I wind her hair around my hand and quietly convert carpentry fractions into decimals. Three eighths is .375. Five eighths is…
She gives a good, hard suck.
"POINT SIX TWO FIVE!" I bellow.
Her mouth makes a popping sound as she releases me. "Come again?"
"I'm trying not to," I gasp. ~ Sarina Bowen

I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

You and I are enough to break anyone's heart - how can we not break our own? ~ Elizabeth Bowen

Aw," he whispered, curling into my body. "I love you, too. So much. That's what I've been trying to tell you. Except I sucked your dick instead. ~ Sarina Bowen

Even in the midst of a bad decision, I could still live in the moment. And the moment was fine. ~ Sarina Bowen

The boy could melt granite with that smile. ~ Sarina Bowen

You know," a low voice drawls as a warm hand squeezes my shoulder. "There's time to feed the kitty before we get dressed for the big day." He's so near that parts of me tingle even in my outrage. "Blake," I say, my voice almost a whisper. "Yes," he breathes beside my ear. "I don't have a cat." He lets out a sexy rumble, his thumb trailing down my arm. And it's then that I realize feed the kitty means… "We aren't feeding the kitty or hiding the salami or anything else you can think of to call it. We're just not. There will be no repeats this weekend." He reaches beneath my wet hair and cups the back of my head, his long fingers trailing across my skull. Goosebumps break out all over my body. "Never say never, J-Babe. ~ Sarina Bowen

A Bowen, in the first place, made Bowen's Court. Since then, with a rather alarming sureness, Bowen's Court has made all the succeeding Bowens. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

When you love someone, all your saved-up wishes start coming out. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

I'm speechless. But my dick has plenty to say. I'm already hard at the idea of Wes being prepped and ready for me. I drop my mouth onto his and he moans again. My tongue glides across his piercing and we're off to the horny dog races. We kiss as if there's a meteor heading straight for the Toronto metropolitan area. Wes's eager hands roam my ass while I suck on his tongue. His eagerness is like a drug, and I want hit after hit. I can feel how hard he is, even through all of our clothes. He wants me to fuck him, and he's all primed and ready? "Mmm," I moan into his mouth. Sexiest fucking thing I ever heard. That's when the doorbell rings. "Hold that thought," I say, pushing up on one arm. "Nooooo!" Wes lifts both his legs to trap me in them. "No." Kiss. "No." Kiss. "Don't even think about it." Pinning his hands to the quilt is easy, because he's horny to the point of distraction. "Stop it, baby. It's the couch delivery. We're paying seventy-five bucks for them to show up on a Saturday. ~ Sarina Bowen

These people know the reality and laugh at it. Such laughter has little concern with what is funny. It is often bitter and sometimes a little mad, for it is the laugh under the mask of tragedy, and also the laughter that masks tears. They are the same. It is the laughter of people who value love and friendship and plenty, who have lived with terror and death and hate. - , Return to Laughter (1954) ~ Elenore Smith Bowen

Fran grounded out to the pitcher. Max popped a weak single to right field. Brendan struck out swinging. But the Tigers hopes for a winning season were down to the last out. ~ Fred Bowen

Maybe it's just that this woman is the answer to a wish I hadn't known I'd made. ~ Sarina Bowen

Next time you put your hands on me at work I'm gonna start moaning like a porn star. ~ Sarina Bowen

I have a bumper sticker that Bowen created that says Regardless of my kids grades, they have an 'A' in my book'. Without play the child that still lives in all of us will always be incomplete. And not only physically, but creatively, intellectually, and spiritually as well. ~ George A. Sheehan

His experiences and hers became harder and harder to tell apart; everything gathered behind them into a common memory - though singly each of them might, must, exist, decide, act; all things done alone came to be no more than a simulcra of behaviour: they waited to live again till they were together...Every love has a poetic relevance of its own... ~ Elizabeth Bowen

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind. ~ Catherine Drinker Bowen

First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences, gestures, attitudes, a burning phrase with no context. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

But that's how life really is. Sometimes you're the fool who believes everything will be fine in the morning. ~ Sarina Bowen

The sheriff handed her down, but with so many looking on he had little choice if he wished to appear civilized. She turned and gave ~ Bella Bowen

What we have is rare. The timing sucks. It's inconvenient. But I won't let you pretend like it's nothing. ~ Sarina Bowen

The car begins to rise toward the sixth floor. The elevator buttons wouldn't even work if I pressed one. Only employees can choose a destination, and only if they're approved to go there.
It's like an even more paranoid version of the Death Star. Although, I've been promised tacos, and I don't think the dark lord eats Mexican. ~ Sarina Bowen

Everybody has their shit to shovel,Callahan.Everybody.Now,yours is right up front where everybody can see it.I don't envy you that.But everybody has some,whether you can see it or not. ~ Sarina Bowen

I don't know what's come over this place,' Maud stated. 'However, the Lord did, so in despair He showed me what I had better do.'
'And did the Lord suggest your sticking up your father for ten shillings?'
'No, I thought of that,' said Maud, not turning a hair. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

Almost everybody wore a curious limpidity of expression, like newborn babies or souls just after death. Dazed but curiously dignified ... after a criseof hysterical revulsion and tiredness, I passed beyondand became entered by a rather sublime feeling. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

I guess time flies when you're playing hockey every day and getting laid every night. ~ Sarina Bowen

Disappointment tears the bearable film of life. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

I love your pastel colors and your pedicures. I love that you're more high maintenance than I am and that I can bogart your moisturizer in the morning. I love that you exasperate me at work and you exhaust me in the bedroom. Of course we're going to be together. It's fucking obvious. ~ Sarina Bowen

She was young-looking--most because of the impression she gave of still being on happy sensuous terms with life. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

I'm on a strict gossip diet. No gossip websites, no gossip magazines. Otherwise, I find it paralyzing to exist. ~ Julie Bowen

It's not her fault she can't cook."
"You are too nice natured, darling. You won't get anywhere in this world being kind and generous. You must turn into a lioness like me and gobble up people who disagree with you."
"I'm not very good at gobbling," I said. "And I want to like people, and be liked by them."
She sighed. "The sooner you get married and have babies to adore the better. ~ Rhys Bowen

He was the sort of languid and elegant young man one would expect to find at a country house party, playing croquet with Bertie Wooster. Frightfully good fun, but not too many brains. ~ Rhys Bowen

Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

Why would you complicate our friendship?" I whispered. "Like it's so simple now?" He countered. ~ Sarina Bowen

You can spare yourself discomfort by keeping your distance, by remaining safely aloof, by maintaining what are largely superficial friendships. But if you do, you will deprive yourselves, and others, of one of the greatest opportunities for learning and for personal growth. - William Bowen ~ Peter Slevin

He spends the majority of the evening in the company of Celia Bowen, whose elaborate gown changes color, shifting through a rainbow of hues to compliment whoever she is closest to. ~ Erin Morgenstern

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

Without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

Hurt people hurt people. We are not being judgmental by separating ourselves from such people. But we should do so with compassion. Compassion is defined as a "keen awareness of the suffering of another coupled with a desire to see it relieved." People hurt others as a result of their own inner strife and pain. Avoid the reactive response of believeing they are bad; they already think so and are acting that way. They aren't bad; they are damaged and they deserve compassion. Note that compassion is an internal process, an understanding of the painful and troubled road trod by another. It is not trying to change or fix that person. ~ Will Bowen

Every love has a poetic relevance of its own; each love brings to light only what to it is relevant. Outside lies the junk-yard of what does not matter. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

I think every album serves as a step in your career. ~ Wade Bowen

I spent six years trying to get over you, and it didn't take. Our time is now. ~ Sarina Bowen

Summer's a total cocktease." He shrugs, repeating himself. "It always ends." He's right about that. Summer always ends. ~ Sarina Bowen

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 Bowen

The Story Girl was written in 1910 and published in 1911. It was the last book I wrote in my old home by the gable window where I had spent so many happy hours of creation. It is my own favourite among my books, the one that gave me the greatest pleasure to write, the one whose characters and landscape seem to me most real. All the children in the book are purely imaginary. The old "King Orchard" was a compound of our old orchard in Cavendish and the orchard at Park Corner. "Peg Bowen" was suggested by a half-witted, gypsy-like personage who roamed at large for many years over the Island and was the terror of my childhood. ~ L.M. Montgomery

If Christ does not appear to meet his 144,000 faithful shortly after midnight on February 6th or 7th, it means that my calculations, based on the Bible, must be revised. ~ Margaret Davis Bowen

Her eyebrows lifted up. "You came here to seduce me armed with just one condom? What were you thinking?"
He breathed out hard. "Oh come on, Tate, don't be nasty. I wasn't sure whether you'd talk to me. I didn't want to jinx it by being cocky and coming here with a string of latex. You know you would have had mt arrogant, self-centered ass for it," he muttered. ~ Elle Aycart

At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial games could be played. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

All things are possible if you believe... ~ Candace C. Bowen

You can bite the pillow when I make you scream. ~ Sarina Bowen

Dialogue should convey a sense of spontaneity but eliminate the repetitiveness of real talk. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

I don't like you very much," she says in a small voice.
"You'll like me better when I've tied you to the bed in your parents' cottage."
She makes a noise that's half rage, half lust. Oh, I've got her number. I really do.
"I brought four neckties in preparation, Hermès, of course. Very silky. ~ Sarina Bowen

Convention was our safeguard: could one have stronger? ~ Elizabeth Bowen

For you born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word"
- Catherine Drinker Bowen ~ Yvonne Finn

I'm not sure what's left of privacy right now, but whatever is left, I want to keep it for a while. ~ Bowen Greenwood

Darling, I don't want you; I've got no place for you; I only want what you give. I don't want the whole of anyone ... What you want is the whole of me-isn't it, isn't it?-and the whole of me isn't there for anybody. In that full sense you want me I don't exist. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

Certain books come to meet me, as do people. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

Colonial America had looked upon (lawyers) as mere tradesmen who earned a questionable living by cleverness and chicanery. ~ Catherine Drinker Bowen

At the teasing penetration, my hips jerk upward. Wes chuckles and eases his finger deeper, until the pad of it is stroking my prostate. My entire body trembles. Tingles. Burns. He spends a maddeningly long time torturing me with his mouth and finger - no, fingers. He's got two inside me now, rubbing that sensitive place and bringing white dots to my eyes. "Wes," I murmur. He raises his head. His gray eyes are smoky with desire. "Hmmm?" he says lazily. "Stop fucking teasing me and start fucking fucking me," I rasp. "Fucking fucking you? Did you really need two fuckings?" "One's an adverb and one's a verb." My voice is as tight as every muscle in my body. I'm about to go up in flames if he doesn't make me come. His laughter warms my thigh. "I love the English language, dude. It's so creative." "Are we really having this conversation right now?" I growl when his teeth sink into my inner thigh. His fingers are still lodged inside me, but no longer moving. ~ Sarina Bowen

He wants to put ranch dressing on your Hidden Valley ~ Sarina Bowen

With you, there's no such thing as casual. The fire I feel for you won't ever go out. ~ Sarina Bowen

Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

Cats are notoriously picky about who they like. And if a cat doesn't like its owner it will go and find another one. Cats do that all the time. ~ James Bowen

What do you want me to say?"

"I wish you would say something. Our life goes by without any comment. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

Wes spares the couch a single glance. "Dude, my couch is wearing a condom. ~ Sarina Bowen

For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

I live alone with my one dog and they say it like it's a sad, it's a terrible thing. This woman lives alone with her two cats. ~ Julie Bowen

All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

One of the marks of true genius is a quality of abundance. A rich, rollicking abundance, enough to give indigestion to ordinary people. Great artists turn it out in rolls, in swatches. They cover whole ceilings with paintings, they chip out a mountainside in stone, they write not one novel but a shelf full. It follows that some of their work is better than other. As much as a third of it may be pretty bad. Shall we say this unevenness is the mark of their humanity - of their proud mortality as well as of their immortality? ~ Catherine Drinker Bowen

Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

The cautious steps of women when something has happened came downstairs, sending vibrations up the spine of the house. The women came down with a kind of congested rush, like lava flowing as fast as it can. ~ Elizabeth Bowen