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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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Elizabeth Hardwick
Age: 91 †
Born: 1916
Born: July 27
Died: 2007
Died: December 2
Critic
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Writer
Lexington
Kentucky
Without
Shapes
Reform
Self
Communication
Useful
Mean
Quite
Measure
Snip
Good
Practice
Shape
Humiliation
Purpose
Experiences
Expressing
Desire
Letters
Embarrassing
Means
Ideals
Ideal
Inspirational
Method
Desires

More quotes by 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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Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.
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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Canadians, do not vomit on me!
Elizabeth Hardwick
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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
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When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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Art is a profession, not a shrine.
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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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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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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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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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
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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.
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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Gossip, or, as we gossips like to say, character analysis.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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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.
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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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
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Houses of evil similarity appeared like rows of disciplined, humiliated orphans.
Elizabeth Hardwick