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

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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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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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Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.
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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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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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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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Memory - the very skin of life.
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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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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Biology is destiny only for girls.
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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Canadians, do not vomit on me!
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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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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Gossip, or, as we gossips like to say, character analysis.
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 famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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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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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.
Elizabeth Hardwick