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… — Elizabeth Hardwick Copy Share Image
A letter is not a dialogue or even an omniscient exposition. It is a fabric of surfaces, a mask, a form as well suited to affectations as to the affections. The letter is, by its natural shape, self-justifying; it is… — Elizabeth Hardwick Copy Share Image
“Leonard Woolf’s endurance of Virginia’s famous frigidity is, we must suppose after the fact, altogether to his credit. Their honeymoon did not bring the… — Elizabeth Hardwick Copy Share Image
“The Brontë sisters have a renewed hold upon our imagination. They were gifted, well-educated, especially self-educated, and desperate. Their seriousness and poverty separated them… — Elizabeth Hardwick Copy Share Image
Biographers, the quick in pursuit of the dead, research, organize, fill in, contradict, and make in this way a sort of completed picture puzzle… — Elizabeth Hardwick Copy Share Image
Adversity is a great teacher, but this teacher makes us pay dearly for its instruction; and often the profit we derive, is not worth… — Elizabeth Hardwick Copy Share Image
I have come to the belief that there is not merely an accidental relationship between bad writing and routine sociological research, but a wonderfully… — Elizabeth Hardwick Copy Share Image
“The large, gaping flaws in the construction of the stories--mad wives in the attic, strange apparitions in Belgium--are a representation of the life she… — Elizabeth Hardwick Copy Share Image
History ... with its long, leisurely, gentlemanly labors, the books arriving by post, the cards to be kept and filed, the sections to be… — Elizabeth Hardwick Copy Share Image
Sex, without society as its landscape, has never been of much interest to fiction. — Elizabeth Hardwick Copy Share Image
“The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world… — Elizabeth Hardwick Copy Share Image
Houses of evil similarity appeared like rows of disciplined, humiliated orphans. — Elizabeth Hardwick Copy Share Image
Gertrude Stein, all courage and will, is a soldier of minimalism. Her work, unlike the resonating silences in the art of Samuel Beckett, embodies… — Elizabeth Hardwick Copy Share Image
“In those years I did not care to enjoy sex, only to have it. That is what seeing Alex again on Fifth Avenue brought… — Elizabeth Hardwick Copy Share Image
The private and serious drama of guilt is not often a useful one for fiction today and its disappearance, following perhaps the disappearance from… — Elizabeth Hardwick Copy Share Image
