Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes

42 Sourced Quotes

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

Elizabeth Hardwick
Houses of evil similarity appeared like rows of disciplined, humiliated orphans.

Elizabeth Hardwick
Sex, without society as its landscape, has never been of much interest to fiction.

Elizabeth Hardwick
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
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
I like many homosexuals and many self-absorbed, childless women, and I can't see them as a menace to the republic, or even to Republicans.

Elizabeth Hardwick
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
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.

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

Elizabeth Hardwick
She never liked the constant presence of her husbands or lovers and did not like, she soon found out, to be alone — a dilemma in one shape or another common to most of mankind.

Elizabeth Hardwick
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.

Elizabeth Hardwick
In general I'd rather talk about other people. Gossip, or as we gossips like to say, character analysis.

Elizabeth Hardwick