Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes & Sayings

Flattery is a challenge. The proper turning away from it, undercutting, diminishing it without offense or vehemence, is a social grace sweeter even than the swift determination to keep ahead in the race of hospitality. — Elizabeth Hardwick

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. — Elizabeth Hardwick

History ... with its long, leisurely, gentlemanly labors, the books arriving by post, the cards to be kept and filed, the sections to be copied, the documents to be checked, is the ideal pursuit for the New England mind. — Elizabeth Hardwick

Memory - the very skin of life. — Elizabeth Hardwick

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

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

[On sociability in Italy:] You may be a hermit or an innkeeper. — Elizabeth Hardwick

A sort of insatiability seems to infect our feelings when we look back on women, particularly on those who are highly interesting and yet whose effort at self-definition through works is fitful, casual, that of an amateur. We are inclined to think they could have done more, that we can make retroactive demands upon them for a greater degree of independence and authenticity. — Elizabeth Hardwick

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

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

The greatest gift is a passion for reading. — Elizabeth Hardwick

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

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

Self-love is an idolatry. Self-hatred is a tragedy. — Elizabeth Hardwick

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

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. — Elizabeth Hardwick

The stain of place hangs on not as a birthright but as a sort of artifice, a bit of cosmetic. — Elizabeth Hardwick

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

Canadians, do not vomit on me! — Elizabeth Hardwick

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

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

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. — Elizabeth Hardwick

Some men define themselves by women although they appear to believe it is quite the opposite; to believe that it is she, rather than themselves, who is being filed away, tagged, named at last like a quivering cell under a microscope. — Elizabeth Hardwick

Alas, the heart is not a metaphor, or at least not always a metaphor. — Elizabeth Hardwick

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

While you are living, part of you has slipped away to the cemetery. — Elizabeth Hardwick

[Charlotte Bronte] had thought of every maneuver for circumventing those stony obstructions of wives who would not remove themselves. — Elizabeth Hardwick

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

Nature should have been pleased to have made this age miserable, without making it also ridiculous. — Elizabeth Hardwick

The future may be an enemy. Time can turn happy days and nights into nothing. — Elizabeth Hardwick

Gossip, or, as we gossips like to say, character analysis. — 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

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. — Elizabeth Hardwick

I am alone here in New York, no longer a we. — Elizabeth Hardwick

Art is a profession, not a shrine. — Elizabeth Hardwick

It is well known that women carry poison in their pockets. Did you expect a gun? A woman with a gun would be just another policeman. We fall in love with the convicts, remember that. Policemen marry girls from the neighborhood, high school looms over their unions, the first uniform is her prom dress and his black bow tie and white shirt. But the girls are thinking of poison, thinking of poison as the lights go out on the dresser where the revolver has been placed with care for the night. The black shoes, the fine, thick serge of the coat, shoulders and thighs of stallions. And the policemen are usually shot down by someone out of shape, thin, thin, nothing but living bones. Remember that. — Elizabeth Hardwick

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

I often think about bachelors, a life of pure decision, of thoughtful calculations, of every inclination honored. They go about on their own, nicely accompanied in their singularity by the companion of possibility. For cannot any man, young or old, rich or poor, turn a few corners and bump into marriage? — Elizabeth Hardwick

The laughter of adults was always very different from the laughter of children. The former indicated a recognition of the familiar, but in children it came from the shock of the new. — Elizabeth Hardwick

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

Gertrude Stein, all courage and will, is a soldier of minimalism. Her work, unlike the resonating silences in the art of Samuel Beckett, embodies in its loquacity and verbosity the curious paradox of the minimalist form. This art of the nuance in repetition and placement she shares with the orchestral compositions of Philip Glass. — Elizabeth Hardwick

Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere. — Elizabeth Hardwick

Writing is not "the establishment of a professional reputation" as if one were a doctor or lawyer; it is not properly in the sentence with creation of a family and the purchase of a home. — 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. — Elizabeth Hardwick

I have come to the belief that there is not merely an accidental relationship between bad writing and routine sociological research, but a wonderfully pure, integral relationship; the awkwardness is necessary and inevitable. — Elizabeth Hardwick

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

Boston - wrinkled, spindly-legged, depleted of nearly all her spiritual and cutaneous oils, provincial, self-esteeming - has gone on spending and spending her inflated bills of pure reputation, decade after decade. — Elizabeth Hardwick

Biology is destiny only for girls. — Elizabeth Hardwick

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

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

All of her news was bad and so her talk was punctuated with "of course" and "naturally. — Elizabeth Hardwick

The great is seldom a deterrent to the mediocre — Elizabeth Hardwick

Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel - and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she. — Elizabeth Hardwick

The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives. — Elizabeth Hardwick

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 — Elizabeth Hardwick

Here in the city the worst thing that can happen to a nation has happened: we are a people afraid of its youth. — 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

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

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

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

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. — Elizabeth Hardwick

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 ... — Elizabeth Hardwick

Nevertheless the severance is rather casual and it drops a stain on our admiration of Nora. Ibsen has put the leaving of her children on the same moral and emotional level as the leaving of her husband and we cannot, in our hearts, asssent to that. It is not only the leaving but the way the play does not have time for suffering, changes of heart. Ibsen has been too much a man in the end. He has taken the man's practice, if not his stated belief, that where self-realization is concerned children shall not be an impediment. — Elizabeth Hardwick

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

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more. — Elizabeth Hardwick

A murder is a challenge, an embarrassment, to the inner life of the dead one, almost a dishonor, like other violent events that may come upon you without warning. It is not certain that you may not have in some careless or driven way chosen to put yourself in the path of a murderer. — Elizabeth Hardwick

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. — 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

A letter is not a dialogue or even an omniscient exposition. It is a fabric of surfaces, a mask, a form as well suited to affectations as to the affections. The letter is, by its natural shape, self-justifying; it is one's own evidence, deposition, a self-serving testimony. In a letter the writer holds all the cards, controls everything about himself and about those assertions he wishes to make concerning events or the worth of others. For completely self-centered characters, the letter form is a complex and rewarding activity. — Elizabeth Hardwick

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. — Elizabeth Hardwick

Since films and television have staged everything imaginable before it happens, a true event, taking place in the real world, brings to mind the landscape of films. — Elizabeth Hardwick

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

There is nothing quite like this novel with its rage and ragings, its discontent and angry restlessness. Wuthering Heights is a virgin's story. — Elizabeth Hardwick