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When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.

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
Exist
Firsts
First
Discovery
Travel

More quotes by 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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I am alone here in New York, no longer a we.
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.
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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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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The future may be an enemy. Time can turn happy days and nights into nothing.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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Houses of evil similarity appeared like rows of disciplined, humiliated orphans.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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While you are living, part of you has slipped away to the cemetery.
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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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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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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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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Canadians, do not vomit on me!
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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Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel—and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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Biology is destiny only for girls.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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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.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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Art is a profession, not a shrine.
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