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.

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

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.

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

Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.

the great is seldom a deterrent to the mediocre

Biology is destiny only for girls.

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.