“A Doll’s House is about money, about the way it turns locks.” — Elizabeth Hardwick A-doll-s-house Copy Share Image
While you are living, part of you has slipped away to the cemetery. — Elizabeth Hardwick Cemetery Copy Share Image
“[Charlotte Bronte] had thought of every maneuver for circumventing those stony obstructions of wives who would not remove themselves.” — Elizabeth Hardwick Bronte Copy Share Image
“You have grown a little beard, I said. You see it is not true that one can't change.” — Elizabeth Hardwick Beard Copy Share Image
Making a living is nothing; the great difficulty is making a point, making a difference-with words. — Elizabeth Hardwick Differences Copy Share Image
Houses of evil similarity appeared like rows of disciplined, humiliated orphans. — Elizabeth Hardwick Evil Copy Share Image
Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more. — Elizabeth Hardwick Book Copy Share Image
Here in the city the worst thing that can happen to a nation has happened: we are a people afraid of its… — Elizabeth Hardwick Afraid Copy Share Image
Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel—and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she. — Elizabeth Hardwick Begin Copy Share Image
Sex, without society as its landscape, has never been of much interest to fiction. — Elizabeth Hardwick Fiction 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… — Elizabeth Hardwick Greatest gift 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… — Elizabeth Hardwick Adversity 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… — Elizabeth Hardwick Biographers Copy Share Image
Boston - wrinkled, spindly-legged, depleted of nearly all her spiritual and cutaneous oils, provincial, self-esteeming - has gone on spending and spending… — Elizabeth Hardwick Bills Copy Share Image
“There is nothing quite like this novel with its rage and ragings, its discontent and angry restlessness. Wuthering Heights is a virgin's… — Elizabeth Hardwick Books Copy Share Image
It's one of the things writing students don't understand. They write a first draft and are quite disappointed, or often should be… — Elizabeth Hardwick Disappointed Copy Share Image
History ... with its long, leisurely, gentlemanly labors, the books arriving by post, the cards to be kept and filed, the sections… — Elizabeth Hardwick Arriving 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… — Elizabeth Hardwick Awkwardness Copy Share Image
“The social world of Ibsen’s plays is greatly restricted, enclosed in a narrow frame, cut off by the very geography of Norway;… — Elizabeth Hardwick Ibsen Copy Share Image
“The 'swapping' is interesting. This practice one had thought confined to certain earnest Americans in the smaller, more tedious cities, to those… — Elizabeth Hardwick Around the corner Copy Share Image
Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so… — Elizabeth Hardwick Communication 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… — Elizabeth Hardwick Art 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… — Elizabeth Hardwick Breaking point Copy Share Image
“Nevertheless the severance is rather casual and it drops a stain on our admiration of Nora. Ibsen has put the leaving of… — Elizabeth Hardwick A-doll-s-house 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… — Elizabeth Hardwick Patience Copy Share Image
Many people believe letters the most personal and revealing form of communication. In them, we expect to find the charmer at his… — Elizabeth Hardwick Appearance 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… — Elizabeth Hardwick Sex 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… — Elizabeth Hardwick Charlotte-bronte Copy Share Image
Gossip, or, as we gossips like to say, character analysis. — Elizabeth Hardwick Analysis Copy Share Image
When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist. — Elizabeth Hardwick Discovery Copy Share Image
“All of her news was bad and so her talk was punctuated with "of course" and "naturally.” — Elizabeth Hardwick Copy Share Image
[On sociability in Italy:] You may be a hermit or an innkeeper. — Elizabeth Hardwick Hermits Copy Share Image