Elizabeth Hardwick > Quotes

“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

“Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.”
― 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, Seduction and Betrayal

“The greatest gift is a passion for reading.”
― 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, Sleepless Nights

“While you are living, part of you has slipped away to the cemetery.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

“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, Seduction and Betrayal

“All of her news was bad and so her talk was punctuated with "of course" and "naturally.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

“Alas, the heart is not a metaphor, or at least not always a metaphor.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

“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, Seduction and Betrayal

“Canadians, do not vomit on me!”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

“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, Sleepless Nights

“Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.”
― 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

“If only one knew what to remember or pretend to remember. Make a decision and what you want from the lost things will present itself. You can take it down like a can from a shelf. Perhaps.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

“The stain of place hangs on not as a birthright but as a sort of artifice, a bit of cosmetic.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

“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, Seduction and Betrayal

“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, Seduction and Betrayal

“The norms of fiction, the reader of Sleepless Nights might well conclude, are after all a constriction, or at least a superfluity: Since to live is to make fiction, what need to disguise the world as another, alternate one? At the same time strict reportage, with its prohibition against invention, imposes its own aesthetically intolerable demands. Sleepless Nights, an alchemical tour de force, reports by inventing and invents by reporting. It continues to remind us how the novel can become richer by permitting itself the resources of essay, journal, memoir, prose poem, chronicle. It is a commonplace that every book needs to find its own form, but how many do?”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

“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, Seduction and Betrayal

“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

“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, Sleepless Nights

“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, Sleepless Nights

“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, Seduction and Betrayal

“When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

“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, Seduction and Betrayal

“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, Sleepless Nights

“[Charlotte Bronte] had thought of every maneuver for circumventing those stony obstructions of wives who would not remove themselves.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Seduction and Betrayal

“-and he flew in to her from the clutter of Somerville, the compost heap behind the Harvard Yard.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

“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, Seduction and Betrayal