Quote

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

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
Going
Baby
Babies
People
Conditions
Mothers
Looking
Relief
Nomads
Born
Welfare
Nomad
House
Condition
Toilet
Mother
Function
Toilets
Another
York
Functions
Seems
Truly
Nothingness

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
Memory - the very skin of life.
Elizabeth Hardwick
Image
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
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
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
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
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
The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives.
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
The future may be an enemy. Time can turn happy days and nights into nothing.
Elizabeth Hardwick
Image
Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel—and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she.
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
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
Image
I am alone here in New York, no longer a we.
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
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
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
When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.
Elizabeth Hardwick