Aging & Wisdom Quote by Elizabeth Bowen

Bowen nails a cruel little paradox of ambition: the young don’t just want to be great, they want greatness to feel like their natural climate. It’s not enough to earn attention; the deeper hunger is to skip the messy proving stage entirely, to be treated as inevitable. That’s the adolescent fantasy of destiny dressed up as confidence.

The sting comes in the pivot: when that desire is finally granted, it doesn’t land as comfort but as vertigo. Being “taken for granted” isn’t pure validation; it’s a kind of disappearance. If people assume your greatness, they stop looking closely. Praise evaporates into expectation, and expectation is a colder room to stand in. Bowen’s word choice matters: “unnerved” is physiological. The nerves that ambition once electrified suddenly go slack. You’re exposed, not crowned.

Subtextually, she’s pointing at how identity gets built on an audience. Youthful striving craves recognition, but it also craves the permission to stop auditioning. When the world stops reacting, the performer panics: if no one is astonished, am I still astonishing? The line also has a social bite. “Taken for granted” can mean being absorbed into an institution, a class, a marriage, a reputation - places where your role is prewritten and your “greatness” becomes mere function.

In Bowen’s world of brittle postwar manners and private unease, this is the psychological cost of arriving. Success doesn’t soothe the ego; it upgrades its anxieties.