Elizabeth Hardwick Quotes

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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Nature should have been pleased to have made this age miserable, without making it also ridiculous.

age nature miserable ridiculous made

The fifties -- they seem to have taken place on a sunny afternoon that asked nothing of you except a drifting belief in the moment and its power to satisfy.

belief power moment place afternoon

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..

purpose method practice good communication experiences desires letters humiliation reform measure

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.

sound voice body reality fiction hopes concentration sex seed

The greatest gift is the 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.

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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.

writing fiction f-scott-fitzgerald