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
determination race challenges
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.
marriage running men
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.
taken sunny-afternoon belief
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.
memories skins
Memory - the very skin of life.
teacher adversity pay
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.
reading book giving
Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.
book reading passion
The greatest gift is a passion for reading.
education reading knowledge
The greatest gift is a 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.
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.
boston cities two
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.
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.
sex landscape fiction
Sex, without society as its landscape, has never been of much interest to fiction.