Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes

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.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading.

Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.

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.

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

The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives.

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.

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.

Self-love is an idolatry. Self-hatred is a tragedy.

The laughter of adults was always very different from the laughter of children. The former indicated a recognition of the familiar, but in children it came from the shock of the new.

When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.

Since films and television have staged everything imaginable before it happens, a true event, taking place in the real world, brings to mind the landscape of films.

The future may be an enemy. Time can turn happy days and nights into nothing.

Memory - the very skin of life.

I am alone here in New York, no longer a we.

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

Gossip, or, as we gossips like to say, character analysis.

Here in the city the worst thing that can happen to a nation has happened: we are a people afraid of its youth.

Art is a profession, not a shrine.

While you are living, part of you has slipped away to the cemetery.

[On sociability in Italy:] You may be a hermit or an innkeeper.

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.

the great is seldom a deterrent to the mediocre

Biology is destiny only for girls.

Canadians, do not vomit on me!

Houses of evil similarity appeared like rows of disciplined, humiliated orphans.

Writing is not "the establishment of a professional reputation" as if one were a doctor or lawyer; it is not properly in the sentence with creation of a family and the purchase of a home.

Making a living is nothing; the great difficulty is making a point, making a difference-with words.

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.

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.

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

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.

[Charlotte Bronte] had thought of every maneuver for circumventing those stony obstructions of wives who would not remove themselves.

There is nothing quite like this novel with its rage and ragings, its discontent and angry restlessness. Wuthering Heights is a virgin's story.