Quote

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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Elizabeth Hardwick
Age: 91 †
Born: 1916
Born: July 27
Died: 2007
Died: December 2
Critic
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Writer
Lexington
Kentucky
Every
Wish
Created
Life
Art
Beings
Another
Mystery
Certain
Cost
Able
Usually
Human
Works
Humans
Create
Material
Great
Rich
Materials

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Gossip, or, as we gossips like to say, character analysis.
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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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Self-love is an idolatry. Self-hatred is a tragedy.
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When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.
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Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.
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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 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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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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The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives.
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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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Art is a profession, not a shrine.
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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.
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The future may be an enemy. Time can turn happy days and nights into nothing.
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Canadians, do not vomit on me!
Elizabeth Hardwick
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Houses of evil similarity appeared like rows of disciplined, humiliated orphans.
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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Biology is destiny only for girls.
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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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