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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
Spending
Legged
Pure
Decade
Cities
Boston
Esteeming
Gone
Oil
Oils
Spiritual
Nearly
Inflated
Self
Reputation
Depleted
Decades
Wrinkled
Bills
Provincial

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Memory - the very skin of life.
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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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Self-love is an idolatry. Self-hatred is a tragedy.
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Biology is destiny only for girls.
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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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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.
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While you are living, part of you has slipped away to the cemetery.
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Houses of evil similarity appeared like rows of disciplined, humiliated orphans.
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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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Canadians, do not vomit on me!
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When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.
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The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives.
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I am alone here in New York, no longer a we.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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