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. – 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
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
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
Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled. – Joan Didion