Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes (13 Quotes)


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

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.



    She was extraordinary. She had her own voice and her own tone and her own subject matter. There was no one quite like her in American literature.

    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 . . .

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

    Letters are useful as a means of expressing the ideal self.... In letters we can reform without practice, beg without humiliation, snip and shape embarrassing experiences to the measure of our own desires....


    It appears that with his curious voice, his ways, he decided to brazen it out, to be himself with an ornamental courage and an impressive conceit,

    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.


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