Quote

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.

Elizabeth Hardwick

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Elizabeth Hardwick
Age: 91 †
Born: 1916
Born: July 27
Died: 2007
Died: December 2
Critic
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Writer
Lexington
Kentucky
World
Education
Console
Passion
Illumination
Moral
Cheap
Reading
Wide
Knowledge
Morality
Experience
Gift
Consoles
Giving
Gives
Distracts
Kind
Greatest
Excites

More quotes by Elizabeth Hardwick

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While you are living, part of you has slipped away to the cemetery.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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Art is a profession, not a shrine.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Gossip, or, as we gossips like to say, character analysis.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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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
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Biology is destiny only for girls.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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Gertrude Stein, all courage and will, is a soldier of minimalism. Her work, unlike the resonating silences in the art of Samuel Beckett, embodies in its loquacity and verbosity the curious paradox of the minimalist form. This art of the nuance in repetition and placement she shares with the orchestral compositions of Philip Glass.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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Houses of evil similarity appeared like rows of disciplined, humiliated orphans.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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Self-love is an idolatry. Self-hatred is a tragedy.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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Memory - the very skin of life.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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I am alone here in New York, no longer a we.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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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
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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.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel—and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.
Elizabeth Hardwick