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

Alas, the heart is not a metaphor, or at least not always a metaphor.

— Elizabeth Hardwick

Biology is destiny only for girls.

— Elizabeth Hardwick

[Charlotte Brontë] had thought of every maneuver for circumventing those stony obstructions of wives who would not remove themselves.

— Elizabeth Hardwick

I am alone here in New York, no longer a.

— Elizabeth Hardwick

In this couple defects were multiplied, as if by a dangerous doubling; weakness fed upon itself without a counterstrength, and they were trapped, defaults, mutually committed, left holes everywhere in their lives. When you read their letters to each other it is often necessary to consult the signature in order to be sure which one has done the writing. Their tone about themselves, their mood, is the fatal one of nostalgia--a passive, consuming, repetitive poetry. Sometimes one feels even its most felicitous and melodious moments are fixed, rigid in expression, and that their feelings have gradually merged with their manner, fallen under the domination of style. Even in their suffering, so deep and beyond relief, their tonal memory controls the words, shaping them into the Fitzgerald tune, always so regretful, regressive, and touched with a careful felicity.

— Elizabeth Hardwick

In those years I did not care to enjoy sex, only to have it. That is what seeing Alex again on Fifth Avenue brought back to me - a youth of fascinated, passionless copulation. There they are, figures in a discolored blur, young men and not so young, the nice ones with automobiles, the dull ones full of suspicions and stinginess. By asking a thousand questions of many heavy souls, I did not learn much. You receive biographies interesting mainly for their coherence. So many are children who from the day of their birth are growing up to be their parents. Look at the voting records, inherited like flat feet.

— Elizabeth Hardwick

Nevertheless, the severance is rather casual, and it drops a stain on our admiration of Nora. Ibsen has put the leaving of her children on the same moral and emotional level as the leaving of her husband, and we cannot, in our hearts, assent to that. It is not only the leaving but the way the play does not have time for suffering, changes of heart. Ibsen has been too much a man in the end. He has taken the man's practice, if not his stated belief, that where self-realization is concerned children shall not be an impediment.

— Elizabeth Hardwick

Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel—and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she.

— Elizabeth Hardwick

Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.

— Elizabeth Hardwick