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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Elizabeth Hardwick

Image
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
Image
Gossip, or, as we gossips like to say, character analysis.
Elizabeth Hardwick
Image
The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives.
Elizabeth Hardwick
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Making a living is nothing the great difficulty is making a point, making a difference-with words.
Elizabeth Hardwick
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Biology is destiny only for girls.
Elizabeth Hardwick
Image
Memory - the very skin of life.
Elizabeth Hardwick
Image
While you are living, part of you has slipped away to the cemetery.
Elizabeth Hardwick
Image
Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.
Elizabeth Hardwick
Image
The future may be an enemy. Time can turn happy days and nights into nothing.
Elizabeth Hardwick
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I am alone here in New York, no longer a we.
Elizabeth Hardwick
Image
Art is a profession, not a shrine.
Elizabeth Hardwick
Image
Canadians, do not vomit on me!
Elizabeth Hardwick
Image
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
Image
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