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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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Elizabeth Hardwick
Age: 91 †
Born: 1916
Born: July 27
Died: 2007
Died: December 2
Critic
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Writer
Lexington
Kentucky
Came
Children
Indicated
Different
Shock
Always
Recognition
Former
Familiar
Laughter
Adults

More quotes by 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.
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Houses of evil similarity appeared like rows of disciplined, humiliated orphans.
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While you are living, part of you has slipped away to the cemetery.
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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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Biology is destiny only for girls.
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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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Gossip, or, as we gossips like to say, character analysis.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives.
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
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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.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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Canadians, do not vomit on me!
Elizabeth Hardwick
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Memory - the very skin of life.
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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When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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Self-love is an idolatry. Self-hatred is a tragedy.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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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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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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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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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