Love Quote by Elizabeth Bowen

Love, for Bowen, is less a clean uplift than a breach in storage. The phrase "saved up wishes" makes desire feel like a private hoard: tucked away, rationed, and quietly accumulating interest over years of self-control. Then love arrives and the vault door swings open. That’s the shock inside the line: affection isn’t just a feeling you add to an already stable self; it’s a force that unpacks you, spilling long-deferred appetites into the room.

Bowen’s verb choice matters. Wishes don’t get articulated; they "start coming out", as if they’d been hidden even from the person who owns them. The subtext is slightly unnerving: love doesn’t merely reveal what you want from the beloved, it reveals what you’ve been denying yourself. That makes romance less about completion than exposure. To love is to risk becoming legible, maybe even to yourself.

Context helps. Bowen’s fiction, shaped by the pressures of early 20th-century British and Irish society and by wartime dislocation, often treats intimacy as something conducted under surveillance: class, family, propriety, the lingering aftertaste of catastrophe. In that world, a "wish" isn’t a cute daydream; it’s a potentially destabilizing claim on life. The line carries her signature coolness and emotional precision: the romantic moment is charged not with fate, but with stored scarcity finally turning into demand. Love, here, is the release of backlog - and the bill comes due in vulnerability.