Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes

28 quotes in 473 categories

• Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.
• 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…
• Canadians, do not vomit on me!
• 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,…
• Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel—and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she.
• While you are living, part of you has slipped away to the cemetery.
• Sentences in which I have tried for a certain light tone -- many of those have to do with events, upheavals, destructions that caused me…
• 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…
• Making a living is nothing; the great difficulty is making a point, making a difference-with words.
• 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…
• Memory - the very skin of life.
• The fifties - they seem to have taken place on a sunny afternoon that asked nothing of you except a drifting belief in the moment…
• In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin — consideration for their feelings. As it usually turns out this is…
• 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…
• The future may be an enemy. Time can turn happy days and nights into nothing.
• The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives.
• 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…
• Self-love is an idolatry. Self-hatred is a tragedy.
• Here in the city the worst thing that can happen to a nation has happened: we are a people afraid of its youth.
• Sex can no longer be the germ, the seed of fiction. Sex is an episode, most properly conveyed in an episodic manner, quickly, often ironically.…

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