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 More Quotes by Elizabeth Hardwick More Quotes From Elizabeth Hardwick 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 passion reading education 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 adversity pay teacher Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more. Elizabeth Hardwick reading giving book The greatest gift is a passion for reading. Elizabeth Hardwick passion reading book Sometimes one has the feeling of an almost supernatural character to the shifts and changes in our national mood. They appear beyond the prose of cause and effect. Elizabeth Hardwick causes feelings character Sex can no longer be the germ, the seed of fiction. Sex is an episode, most properly conveyed in an episodic manner, quickly, often ironically. It is a bursting forth of only one of the cells in the body of the omnipotent I, the one who hopes by concentration of tone and voice to utter the sound of reality. Elizabeth Hardwick cells sex reality It's one of the things writing students don't understand. They write a first draft and are quite disappointed, or often should be disappointed. They don't understand that they have merely begun, and that they may be merely beginning even in the second or third draft. Elizabeth Hardwick writing may firsts 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 movie real mind When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist. Elizabeth Hardwick discovery travel firsts The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives. Elizabeth Hardwick footnotes baggage weight Memory - the very skin of life. Elizabeth Hardwick skins memories the great is seldom a deterrent to the mediocre Elizabeth Hardwick deterrent mediocre 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 laughter adults children In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin — consideration for their feelings. As it usually turns out this is an enormous, unthinkable inflation few men will remit, or if they will, only with a sense of being overcharged. Elizabeth Hardwick marriage running men Making a living is nothing; the great difficulty is making a point, making a difference-with words. Elizabeth Hardwick making-a-difference difficulty differences 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 june morning book Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel—and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she. Elizabeth Hardwick novel I have come to the belief that there is not merely an accidental relationship between bad writing and routine sociological research, but a wonderfully pure, integral relationship; the awkwardness is necessary and inevitable. Elizabeth Hardwick routine research writing Art is a profession, not a shrine. Elizabeth Hardwick art-is shrines art 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 communication inspirational mean
