Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes

A collection of quotes by Elizabeth Hardwick.

Elizabeth Hardwick was an American literary critic, novelist, and essayist. Born on July 27, 1916, in Lexington, Kentucky, she attended the University of Kentucky before moving to New York City to pursue a career in writing. Hardwick co-founded The New York Review of Books in 1963 and became known for her insightful and influential literary criticism. She published several novels and essay collections, including "Sleepless Nights" and "Seduction and Betrayal." Hardwick's work explored themes of identity, women's issues, and the complexities of human relationships. She passed away on December 2, 2007, leaving behind a significant literary legacy.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it

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


The private and serious drama of guilt is not often a useful

The private and serious drama of guilt is not often a useful one for fiction today and its disappearance, following perhaps the disappearance from life, appears as a natural, almost unnoticed relief, like some of the challenging illnesses wiped out by drug and vaccines.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Life Guilt

Sex can no longer be the germ, the seed of fiction. Sex is a

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

Mothers born on relief have their babies on relief. Nothingn

Mothers born on relief have their babies on relief. Nothingness, truly, seems to be the condition of these New York people. They are nomads going from one rooming house to another, looking for a toilet that functions.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Welfare

The fifties -- they seem to have taken place on a sunny afte

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.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Twentieth Century

The language of the younger generation has the brutality of

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

Language

Adversity is a great teacher, but this teacher makes us pay

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

Many people believe letters the most personal and revealing

Many people believe letters the most personal and revealing form of communication. In them, we expect to find the charmer at his nap, slumped, open-mouthed, profoundly himself without thought for appearances. Yet, this is not quite true. 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 conversation, those uneasy eyes upon you, those lips ready with an emendation before you have begun to speak, are a powerful deterrent to unreality, even to hope. In letters we can reform without practice, beg without humiliation, snip and shape embarrassing experiences to the measure of our own desires...

Elizabeth Hardwick

Letters (writing)