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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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Elizabeth Hardwick
Age: 91 †
Born: 1916
Born: July 27
Died: 2007
Died: December 2
Critic
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Writer
Lexington
Kentucky
Pay
Worth
Dearly
Teacher
Derive
Often
Instruction
Makes
Adversity
Great
Price
Profit
Paid

More quotes by Elizabeth Hardwick

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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.
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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.
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Memory - the very skin of life.
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Gossip, or, as we gossips like to say, character analysis.
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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.
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While you are living, part of you has slipped away to the cemetery.
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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.
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Making a living is nothing the great difficulty is making a point, making a difference-with words.
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When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.
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Self-love is an idolatry. Self-hatred is a tragedy.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Biology is destiny only for girls.
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The future may be an enemy. Time can turn happy days and nights into nothing.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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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.
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Houses of evil similarity appeared like rows of disciplined, humiliated orphans.
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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.
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Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.
Elizabeth Hardwick