And yet in a way I would rather fail point blank. Things one can do have no value. I don't mind feeling small myself, but I dread finding the world i… - Elizabeth Bowen

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We have really no absent friends.

"What's the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually— our sense of personality is a sense of outrage and we'll never get outside of it." But the hold of the country was that, she considered, it could be thought of in terms of oneself, so interpreted.

Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.