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 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 amelioration they had hoped for and it is incredibly innocent and moving to think of them discussing it with Vanessa. They wanted to know when she had first had an orgasm. She said she couldn’t remember… — Elizabeth Hardwick Copy Share
“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
