Quotes from Elizabeth Hardwick

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.

A Doll's House is about money, about the way it turns locks.

The social world of Ibsen's plays is greatly restricted, enclosed in a narrow frame, cut off by the very geography of Norway; the long, dark winters make for social repetition…Everyone else you know is right there, so to speak. This small-town life has moral consequences always; the players live with the threat of trouble over the most petty matters.

Farewell to Kentucky and our agreeable vices. We go to bed early, but because of whiskey seldom with a clear head. We are fond of string beans and thin slices of salty ham. When I left home my brother said: It will be wonderful if you make a success of life, then you can follow the races. Farewell

In art it is not often possible to make direct use of your dreams of tomorrow and your excuses for yesterday.

and he flew in to her from the clutter of Somerville, the compost heap behind the Harvard Yard.

Biology is destiny only for girls.

Je n'ai jamais cessé, tout au long de ma vie, de rechercher l'aide d'un homme. Je l'ai trouvée souvent et, plus souvent encore, elle m'a fait défaut.

You have grown a little beard, I said. You see it is not true that one can't change.

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.

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

The torment of personal relations. Nothing new there except in the disguise, and in the escape on the wings of adjectives. Sweet to be pierced by daggers at the end of paragraphs.

Sometimes she appears to be thinking there has been a miscalculation in the political universe. Dragons with seven heads and ten horns: were they not seen this year? A leopard came out of the sea and sank back down. But patience, patience.

Memory - the very skin of life.

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.

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...

Collaborating in the very private way of love or the highest kind of friendship… is the way for gifted, energetic wives of writers to a sort of composition of their own, this peculiar illusion of collaboration.

This is the unspoken contract of a wife and her works. In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin—consideration for their feelings. And 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.

I think all writing is profoundly unmarried.

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.

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.

The greatest gift is the 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.

Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.

They had created themselves together, and they always saw themselves, their youth, their love, their lost youth and lost love, their failures and memories, as a sort of living fiction.