Elizabeth Hardwick
Elizabeth Hardwick
Elizabeth Hardwickwas an American literary critic, novelist, and short story writer...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth27 July 1916
CountryUnited States of America
character gossip analysis
Gossip, or, as we gossips like to say, character analysis.
mediocre deterrent
the great is seldom a deterrent to the mediocre
powerful believe communication
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.
may hermits sociability
[On sociability in Italy:] You may be a hermit or an innkeeper.
writing research routine
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.
character feelings causes
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 ...
travel discovery firsts
When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.
girl destiny biology
Biology is destiny only for girls.
character self wish
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.
evil house orphan
Houses of evil similarity appeared like rows of disciplined, humiliated orphans.
book history long
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.
spiritual boston cities
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.
art wish cost
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.
children light upheaval
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.