Quote

Making a living is nothing the great difficulty is making a point, making a difference-with words.

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
Words
Making
Living
Nothing
Great
Difficulty
Difference
Differences
Point

More quotes by Elizabeth Hardwick

Image
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.
Elizabeth Hardwick
Image
While you are living, part of you has slipped away to the cemetery.
Elizabeth Hardwick
Image
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
Image
The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives.
Elizabeth Hardwick
Image
Gossip, or, as we gossips like to say, character analysis.
Elizabeth Hardwick
Image
Canadians, do not vomit on me!
Elizabeth Hardwick
Image
Self-love is an idolatry. Self-hatred is a tragedy.
Elizabeth Hardwick
Image
When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.
Elizabeth Hardwick
Image
Houses of evil similarity appeared like rows of disciplined, humiliated orphans.
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
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
Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.
Elizabeth Hardwick
Image
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
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
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
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
Image
Memory - the very skin of life.
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
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
Art is a profession, not a shrine.
Elizabeth Hardwick