Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes

Quotes about:

• The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Education, Reading, Passion

  53 Copy quote

• The greatest gift is a passion for reading.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Book, Reading, Passion

  40 Copy quote

• When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Travel, Discovery, Firsts

  Elizabeth Hardwick (2011). “Sleepless Nights”, p.10, New York Review of Books

  9 Copy quote

• Adversity is a great teacher, but this teacher makes us pay dearly for its instruction; and often the profit we derive, is not worth the price we paid.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Teacher, Adversity, Pay

  22 Copy quote

• Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Reading, Book, Giving

  19 Copy quote

• Making a living is nothing; the great difficulty is making a point, making a difference-with words.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Differences, Making A Difference, Difficulty

  Elizabeth Hardwick (2017). “The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick”, p.112, New York Review of Books

  4 Copy quote

• While you are living, part of you has slipped away to the cemetery.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Cemetery

  6 Copy quote

• Memory - the very skin of life.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Memories, Skins

  Elizabeth Hardwick (1962). “A View of My Own: Essays on Literature and Society”

  7 Copy quote

• It's one of the things writing students don't understand. They write a first draft and are quite disappointed, or often should be disappointed. They don't understand that they have merely begun, and that they may be merely beginning even in the second or third draft.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Writing, May, Firsts

  5 Copy quote

• The future may be an enemy. Time can turn happy days and nights into nothing.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Future, Night, Enemy

  Elizabeth Hardwick (1984). “Bartleby in Manhattan, and Other Essays”, Vintage

  7 Copy quote

• the great is seldom a deterrent to the mediocre

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Mediocre, Deterrent

  Elizabeth Hardwick (2011). “Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature”, p.6, New York Review of Books

  4 Copy quote

• In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin — consideration for their feelings. As it usually turns out this is an enormous, unthinkable inflation few men will remit, or if they will, only with a sense of being overcharged.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Marriage, Running, Men

  Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature "Amateurs" (1974)

  8 Copy quote

• Sometimes one has the feeling of an almost supernatural character to the shifts and changes in our national mood. They appear beyond the prose of cause and effect.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Character, Feelings, Causes

  Elizabeth Hardwick (1962). “A View of My Own: Essays on Literature and Society”

  10 Copy quote

• Gossip, or, as we gossips like to say, character analysis.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Character, Gossip, Analysis

  "Elizabeth Hardwick, The Art of Fiction No. 87". Interview with Darryl Pinckney, www.theparisreview.org. 1985.

  5 Copy quote

• 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 life is rich in material.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Art, Wish, Cost

  Elizabeth Hardwick (1998). “Sight-readings: American Fictions”, Random House Incorporated

  8 Copy quote

• Harvard (across the river in Cambridge) and Boston are two ends of one mustache. ... Without the faculty, the visitors, the events that Harvard brings to the life here, Boston would be intolerable to anyone except genealogists, antique dealers, and those who find repletion in a closed local society.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Two, Rivers, Boston

  Elizabeth Hardwick (1962). “A View of My Own: Essays on Literature and Society”

  5 Copy quote

• 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 of films.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Movie, Real, Mind

  Elizabeth Hardwick (1984). “Bartleby in Manhattan, and Other Essays”, Vintage

  8 Copy quote

• Here in the city the worst thing that can happen to a nation has happened: we are a people afraid of its youth.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Cities, People, Youth

  Elizabeth Hardwick (1984). “Bartleby in Manhattan, and Other Essays”, Vintage

  5 Copy quote

• The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Weight, Baggage, Footnotes

  Elizabeth Hardwick (1984). “Bartleby in Manhattan, and Other Essays”, Vintage

  17 Copy quote

• 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 purpose. In letters we can reform without practice, beg without humiliation, snip and shape embarrassing experiences to the measure of our own desires.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Inspirational, Communication, Mean

  Elizabeth Hardwick (2017). “The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick”, p.27, New York Review of Books

  7 Copy quote

• 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 bureaucratic euphemism.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Military, Hands, Cities

  Elizabeth Hardwick (1984). “Bartleby in Manhattan, and Other Essays”, Vintage

  57 Copy quote

• Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel—and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Novel

  5 Copy quote

• Biographers, the quick in pursuit of the dead, research, organize, fill in, contradict, and make in this way a sort of completed picture puzzle with all the scramble turned into a blue eye and the parts of the right leg fitted together.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Eye, Blue, Together

  Elizabeth Hardwick (1998). “Sight-readings: American Fictions”, Random House Incorporated

  4 Copy quote

• 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. It is a bursting forth of only one of the cells in the body of the omnipotent I, the one who hopes by concentration of tone and voice to utter the sound of reality.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Sex, Reality, Cells

  Elizabeth Hardwick (2011). “Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature”, p.205, New York Review of Books

  8 Copy quote

• Sentences in which I have tried for a certain light tone -- many of those have to do with events, upheavals, destructions that caused me to weep like a child.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Children, Light, Events

  4 Copy quote

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