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… — 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 forever from the interests and follies of respectable young girls. It was Charlotte’s goal to represent the plight of plain, poor, high-minded young women. Sometimes she gave them more rectitude and right thinking than we can… — Elizabeth Hardwick Copy Share
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
