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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
Always
Recognition
Former
Familiar
Laughter
Adults
Came
Children
Indicated
Different
Shock

More quotes by Elizabeth Hardwick

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I am alone here in New York, no longer a we.
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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.
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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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When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.
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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.
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Houses of evil similarity appeared like rows of disciplined, humiliated orphans.
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.
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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.
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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 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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Making a living is nothing the great difficulty is making a point, making a difference-with words.
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While you are living, part of you has slipped away to the cemetery.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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Self-love is an idolatry. Self-hatred is a tragedy.
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Canadians, do not vomit on me!
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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.
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