Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes.
Nature should have been pleased to have made this age miserable, without making it also ridiculous.
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.
The greatest gift is a passion for reading.
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.
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.
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.
Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel—and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she.
Gossip, or, as we gossips like to say, character analysis.
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.
Sex, without society as its landscape, has never been of much interest to fiction.
While you are living, part of you has slipped away to the cemetery.
The fifties – they seem to have taken place on a sunny afternoon that asked nothing of you except a drifting belief in the moment and its power to satisfy.
The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives.
Here in the city the worst thing that can happen to a nation has happened: we are a people afraid of its youth.
The future may be an enemy. Time can turn happy days and nights into nothing.
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.
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.
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.
Memory – the very skin of life.
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.
