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Top Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes

Browse top 22 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Elizabeth Hardwick.

Favorite Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes

1. "In those years I did not care to enjoy sex, only to have it. That is what seeing Alex again on Fifth Avenue brought back to me - a youth of fascinated, passionless copulation. There they are, figures in a discoloured blur, young men and not so young, the nice ones with automobiles, the dull ones full of suspicions and stinginess. By asking a thousand questions of many heavy souls, I did not learn much. You receive biographies interesting mainly for their coherence. So many are children who from the day of their birth are growing up to be their parents. Look at the voting records, inherited like flat feet." ~ Elizabeth Hardwick
2. "I am alone here in New York, no longer a we." ~ Elizabeth Hardwick
3. "Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel—and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she." ~ Elizabeth Hardwick
4. "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." ~ Elizabeth Hardwick
5. "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
6. "Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more." ~ Elizabeth Hardwick
7. "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
8. "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
9. "The large, gaping flaws in the construction of the stories--mad wives in the attic, strange apparitions in Belgium--are a representation of the life she could not face; these gothic subterfuges represent the mind at a breaking point, frantic to find any way out. If the flaws are only to be attributed to the practicce of popular fiction of the time, we cannot then explain the large amount of genuine feeling that goes into them. They stand for the hidden wishes of an intolerable life." ~ Elizabeth Hardwick
10. "The 'swapping' is interesting. This practice one had thought confined to certain earnest Americans in the smaller, more tedious cities, to those wives and husbands who had read sex manuals and radically wanted more of life even if it had to be, like pizza, brought in from around the corner--all of this was accomplished by Bloomsbury in the lightest, most spontaneous and good-natured manner." ~ Elizabeth Hardwick
11. "In this couple defects were multiplied, as if by a dangerous doubling; weakness fed upon itself without a counterstrength and they were trapped, defaults, mutually committed, left holes everywhere in their lives. When you read their letters to each other it is often necessary to consult the signature in order to be sure which one has done the writing. Their tone about themselves, their mood, is the fatal one of nostalgia--a passive, consuming, repetitive poetry. Sometimes one feels even its most felicitious and melodious moments are fixed, rigid in experession, and that their feelings have gradually merged with their manner, fallen under the domination of style. Even in their suffering, so deep and beyond relief, their tonal memory controls the words, shaping them into the Fitzgerald tune, always so regretful, regressive, and touched with a careful felicity." ~ Elizabeth Hardwick
12. "All of her news was bad and so her talk was punctuated with "of course" and "naturally." ~ Elizabeth Hardwick
13. "Canadians, do not vomit on me!" ~ Elizabeth Hardwick
14. "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, the one I am leading today. Each morning the blue clock and the crocheted bedspread, the table with the Phone, the books and magazines, the Times at the door." ~ Elizabeth Hardwick
15. "the great is seldom a deterrent to the mediocre" ~ Elizabeth Hardwick
16. "The Brontë sisters have a renewed hold upon our imagination. They were gifted, well-educated, especially self-educated, and desperate. Their seriousness and poverty separated them forever from the interests and follies of respectable young girls. It was Charlotte's goal to represent the plight of plain, poor, high-minded young women. Sometimes she gave them more rectitude and right thinking than we can easily endure, but she knew their vulnerability, the neglect they expected and received, the spiritual and psychological scars inflicted upon them, the way their frantic efforts were scarcely noticed, much less admired or condoned." ~ Elizabeth Hardwick
17. "I was immensely moved by this novel when I read it recently and yet I cannot think of anything to say about it except that it is wonderful. The people are not characters, there is no plot in the usual sense. What can you bring to bear: verisimilitude — to what? You can merely say over and over that it is very good, very beautiful, that when you were reading it you were happy." ~ Elizabeth Hardwick
18. "A Doll's House is about money, about the way it turns locks." ~ Elizabeth Hardwick
19. "Leonard Woolf's endurance of Virginia's famous frigidity is, we must suppose after the fact, altogether to his credit. Their honeymoon did not bring the amelioration they had hoped for and it is incredibly innocent and moving to think of them discussing it with Vanessa. They wanted to know when she had first had an orgasm. She said she couldn't remember but she knew she had been "sympathetic" from the age of two. Vita Sackville-West said about Virginia, "She dislikes the possessiveness and love of domination in men. In fact she dislikes the quality of masculinity." ~ Elizabeth Hardwick
20. "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." ~ Elizabeth Hardwick
21. "You have grown a little beard, I said.You see it is not true that one can't change." ~ Elizabeth Hardwick
22. "[Charlotte Bronte] had thought of every maneuver for circumventing those stony obstructions of wives who would not remove themselves." ~ Elizabeth Hardwick

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Today's Quote

Eclectic yet classic with a playful bohemian twist is how I'd describe my style."
Author: Alice Temperley

What Did Elizabeth Hardwick Talk About?

Hey
Here
Wit
Con
Ear
She
Read
Lit
Hen
Thin
Rest
Ally
Era
Thou
Act
Sting
Ought
Ring
Ways
Young
King
Times
Able
Each
Ten
Rent
Wives
Cannot
Nation
Self
Lie
Themselves

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