Daily Inspiration Quote by Elizabeth Bowen

Bowen skewers romance with a scalpel, not a sermon. “Pity the selfishness of lovers” opens as a command that feels almost uncharitable: lovers, those cultural mascots of generosity, are being indicted for self-interest. But the pivot is that she asks for pity, not punishment. The line carries Bowen’s signature cool empathy - an unsentimental tenderness toward human delusion.

Calling that selfishness “brief” is both consolation and critique. Love’s possessiveness burns hot, then burns out; it’s a short-lived tyranny that believes it’s a permanent state. “A forlorn hope” sharpens the idea: the lovers’ project is not just doomed, it’s poignantly doomed, a desperate charge against reality. Bowen borrows a phrase with military ghost-notes - the “forlorn hope” was the near-suicidal storming party - and turns intimacy into a battlefield where the bravest act may also be the most misguided.

Then the final clause lands like a locked door: “it is impossible.” Not love itself, but the lovers’ selfishness - the fantasy that another person can be made to serve as proof, shelter, and mirror all at once. Bowen’s novels, written in the shadowed modernity of the early-to-mid 20th century, return to people trying to privatize meaning inside unstable social worlds. Here, she suggests that desire naturally reaches for ownership, but ownership can’t hold. The ache isn’t that lovers want too much; it’s that what they want cannot be built, only briefly believed.