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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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Elizabeth Hardwick
Age: 91 †
Born: 1916
Born: July 27
Died: 2007
Died: December 2
Critic
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Writer
Lexington
Kentucky
Pure
Decade
Cities
Boston
Esteeming
Gone
Oil
Oils
Spiritual
Nearly
Inflated
Self
Reputation
Depleted
Decades
Wrinkled
Bills
Provincial
Spending
Legged

More quotes by 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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Self-love is an idolatry. Self-hatred is a tragedy.
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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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
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Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.
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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When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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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.
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.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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Making a living is nothing the great difficulty is making a point, making a difference-with words.
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.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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I am alone here in New York, no longer a we.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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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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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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Art is a profession, not a shrine.
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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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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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
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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.
Elizabeth Hardwick