Top 58 Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes

#1. You have grown a little beard, I said.
You see it is not true that one can't change.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #18275
#2. In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin - consideration for their feelings. As it usually turns out this is an enormous, unthinkable inflation few men will remit, or if they will, only with a sense of being overcharged.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #46240
#3. The private and serious drama of guilt is not often a useful one for fiction today and its disappearance, following perhaps the disappearance from life, appears as a natural, almost unnoticed relief, like some of the challenging illnesses wiped out by drug and vaccines.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #97912
#4. The fifties - they seem to have taken place on a sunny afternoon that asked nothing of you except a drifting belief in the moment and its power to satisfy.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #112556
#5. I am alone here in New York, no longer a we.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #154558
#6. [Charlotte Bronte] had thought of every maneuver for circumventing those stony obstructions of wives who would not remove themselves.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #165038
#7. How certain human beings are able to create works of art is a mystery, and why they should wish to do so, at a great cost to themselves usually, is another mystery. Works are not created by one's life; every life is rich in material.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #220517
#8. Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so good for this purpose. In letters we can reform without practice, beg without humiliation, snip and shape embarrassing experiences to the measure of our own desires ...

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #276299
#9. The torment of personal relations. Nothing new there except in the disguise, and in the escape on the wings of adjectives. Sweet to be pierced by daggers at the end of paragraphs.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #333403
#10. The stain of place hangs on not as a birthright but as a sort of artifice, a bit of cosmetic.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #335365
#11. Memory - the very skin of life.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #358090
#12. All of her news was bad and so her talk was punctuated with "of course" and "naturally.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #439025
#13. The greatest gift is the passion for reading.
It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites,
it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind.
It is a moral illumination.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #461387
#14. In art it is not often possible to make direct use of your dreams of tomorrow and your excuses for yesterday.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #571137
#15. The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #587044
#16. Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #620598
#17. Making a living is nothing; the great difficulty is making a point, making a difference - with words.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #656392
#18. Art is a profession, not a shrine.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #697766
#19. Flattery is a challenge. The proper turning away from it, undercutting, diminishing it without offense or vehemence, is a social grace sweeter even than the swift determination to keep ahead in the race of hospitality.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #796858
#20. [On sociability in Italy:] You may be a hermit or an innkeeper.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #822077
#21. Sex, without society as its landscape, has never been of much interest to fiction.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #833496
#22. Some men define themselves by women although they appear to believe it is quite the opposite; to believe that it is she, rather than themselves, who is being filed away, tagged, named at last like a quivering cell under a microscope.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #857530
#23. Nature should have been pleased to have made this age miserable, without making it also ridiculous.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #894395
#24. Here in the city the worst thing that can happen to a nation has happened: we are a people afraid of its youth.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #899506
#25. While you are living, part of you has slipped away to the cemetery.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #928335
#26. Since films and television have staged everything imaginable before it happens, a true event, taking place in the real world, brings to mind the landscape of films.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #941542
#27. Biographers, the quick in pursuit of the dead, research, organize, fill in, contradict, and make in this way a sort of completed picture puzzle with all the scramble turned into a blue eye and the parts of the right leg fitted together.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #947756
#28. The greatest gift is a passion for reading.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #997259
#29. Writing is not "the establishment of a professional reputation" as if one were a doctor or lawyer; it is not properly in the sentence with creation of a family and the purchase of a home.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1003863
#30. Gossip, or, as we gossips like to say, character analysis.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1044987
#31. There is nothing quite like this novel with its rage and ragings, its discontent and angry restlessness. Wuthering Heights is a virgin's story.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1078429
#32. Harvard (across the river in Cambridge) and Boston are two ends of one mustache ... Without the faculty, the visitors, the events that Harvard brings to the life here, Boston would be intolerable to anyone except genealogists, antique dealers, and those who find repletion in a closed local society.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1123433
#33. Adversity is a great teacher, but this teacher makes us pay dearly for its instruction; and often the profit we derive, is not worth the price we paid.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1138988
#34. Biology is destiny only for girls.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1152683
#35. History ... with its long, leisurely, gentlemanly labors, the books arriving by post, the cards to be kept and filed, the sections to be copied, the documents to be checked, is the ideal pursuit for the New England mind.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1177021
#36. Sometimes one has the feeling of an almost supernatural character to the shifts and changes in our national mood. They appear beyond the prose of cause and effect ...

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1198689
#37. It is June. This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work and lead this life, the one I am leading today. Each morning the blue clock and the crocheted bedspread, the table with the Phone, the books and magazines, the Times at the door.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1209583
#38. Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel - and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1222216
#39. When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1227195
#40. Houses of evil similarity appeared like rows of disciplined, humiliated orphans.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1287147
#41. The language of the younger generation has the brutality of the city and an assertion of threatening power at hand, not to come. It is military, theatrical, and at its most coherent probably a lasting repudiation of empty courtesy and bureaucratic euphemism.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1289419
#42. Alas, the heart is not a metaphor, or at least not always a metaphor.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1291086
#43. Self-love is an idolatry. Self-hatred is a tragedy.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1301449
#44. Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1338848
#45. A murder is a challenge, an embarrassment, to the inner life of the dead one, almost a dishonor, like other violent events that may come upon you without warning. It is not certain that you may not have in some careless or driven way chosen to put yourself in the path of a murderer.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1359178
#46. The laughter of adults was always very different from the laughter of children. The former indicated a recognition of the familiar, but in children it came from the shock of the new.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1425733
#47. Boston - wrinkled, spindly-legged, depleted of nearly all her spiritual and cutaneous oils, provincial, self-esteeming - has gone on spending and spending her inflated bills of pure reputation, decade after decade.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1498273
#48. The future may be an enemy. Time can turn happy days and nights into nothing.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1503351
#49. The great is seldom a deterrent to the mediocre

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1543046
#50. They had created themselves together, and they always saw themselves, their youth, their love, their lost youth and lost love, their failures and memories, as a sort of living fiction.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1549803
#51. -and he flew in to her from the clutter of Somerville, the compost heap behind the Harvard Yard.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1578715
#52. A Doll's House is about money, about the way it turns locks.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1580537
#53. Sentences in which I have tried for a certain light tone
many of those have to do with events, upheavals, destructions that caused me to weep like a child.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1588419
#54. It's one of the things writing students don't understand. They write a first draft and are quite disappointed, or often should be disappointed. They don't understand that they have merely begun, and that they may be merely beginning even in the second or third draft.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1592039
#55. Canadians, do not vomit on me!

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1684236
#56. Mothers born on relief have their babies on relief. Nothingness, truly, seems to be the condition of these New York people. They are nomads going from one rooming house to another, looking for a toilet that functions.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1749347
#57. Farewell to Kentucky and our agreeable vices. We go to bed early, but because of whiskey seldom with a clear head. We are fond of string beans and thin slices of salty ham. When I left home my brother said: It will be wonderful if you make a success of life, then you can follow the races. Farewell

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1800795
#58. I have come to the belief that there is not merely an accidental relationship between bad writing and routine sociological research, but a wonderfully pure, integral relationship; the awkwardness is necessary and inevitable.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes #1864868

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