Top 40 Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

2. “The greatest gift is a passion for reading.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

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3. “Biology is destiny only for girls.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

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

— Elizabeth Hardwick

5. “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.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

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

— Elizabeth Hardwick

7. “Self-love is an idolatry. Self-hatred is a tragedy.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

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

— Elizabeth Hardwick

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9. “If only one knew what to remember or pretend to remember. Make a decision and what you want from the lost things will present itself. You can take it down like a can from a shelf. Perhaps.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

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

— Elizabeth Hardwick

11. “It’s one of the things writing students don’t understand. They write a first draft and are quite disappointed, or often should be disappointed. They don’t understand that they have merely begun, and that they may be merely beginning even in the second or third draft.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

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

— Elizabeth Hardwick

13. “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.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

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

— Elizabeth Hardwick

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

— Elizabeth Hardwick

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

— Elizabeth Hardwick

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

— Elizabeth Hardwick

18. “The private and serious drama of guilt is not often a useful one for fiction today and its disappearance, following perhaps the disappearance from life, appears as a natural, almost unnoticed relief, like some of the challenging illnesses wiped out by drug and vaccines.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

19. “The stain of place hangs on not as a birthright but as a sort of artifice, a bit of cosmetic.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

20. “Biographers, the quick in pursuit of the dead, research, organize, fill in, contradict, and make in this way a sort of completed picture puzzle with all the scramble turned into a blue eye and the parts of the right leg fitted together.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

21. “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.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

22. “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.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

23. “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.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

24. “Memory – the very skin of life.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

25. “Art is a profession, not a shrine.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

26. “A murder is a challenge, an embarrassment, to the inner life of the dead one, almost a dishonor, like other violent events that may come upon you without warning. It is not certain that you may not have in some careless or driven way chosen to put yourself in the path of a murderer.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

27. “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.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

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

— Elizabeth Hardwick

29. “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.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

30. “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.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

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

— Elizabeth Hardwick

32. “In art it is not often possible to make direct use of your dreams of tomorrow and your excuses for yesterday.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

33. “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.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

34. “It is June. This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work and lead this life, the one I am leading today. Each morning the blue clock and the crocheted bedspread, the table with the Phone, the books and magazines, the Times at the door.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

35. “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.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

36. “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.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

37. “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.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

38. “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 letters we can reform without practice, beg without humiliation, snip and shape embarrassing experiences to the measure of our own desires...”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

39. “Some men define themselves by women although they appear to believe it is quite the opposite; to believe that it is she, rather than themselves, who is being filed away, tagged, named at last like a quivering cell under a microscope.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

40. “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.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

41. “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...”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

42. “Canadians, do not vomit on me!”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

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

— Elizabeth Hardwick

44. “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.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

45. “Farewell to Kentucky and our agreeable vices. We go to bed early, but because of whiskey seldom with a clear head. We are fond of string beans and thin slices of salty ham. When I left home my brother said: It will be wonderful if you make a success of life, then you can follow the races. Farewell.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick