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Sleepless Nights QUOTES

Sleepless Nights QUOTES

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

― Elizabeth Hardwick , Sleepless Nights

2 " 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 discoloured 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 , Sleepless Nights

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

― Elizabeth Hardwick , Sleepless Nights

4 " Je n'ai jamais cessé, tout au long de ma vie, de rechercher l'aide d'un homme. Je l'ai trouvée souvent et, plus souvent encore, elle m'a fait défaut. "

― Elizabeth Hardwick , Sleepless Nights

5 " Canadians, do not vomit on me! "

― Elizabeth Hardwick , Sleepless Nights

6 " While you are living, part of you has slipped away to the cemetery. "

― Elizabeth Hardwick , Sleepless Nights

7 " All of her news was bad and so her talk was punctuated with "of course" and "naturally. "

― Elizabeth Hardwick , Sleepless Nights

8 " The stain of place hangs on not as a birthright but as a sort of artifice, a bit of cosmetic. "

― Elizabeth Hardwick , Sleepless Nights

9 " Some men define themselves by women although they appear to believe it is quite the opposite; to believe that it is she, rather than themselves, who is being filed away, tagged, named at last like a quivering cell under a microscope. "

― Elizabeth Hardwick , Sleepless Nights

10 " The norms of fiction, the reader of Sleepless Nights might well conclude, are after all a constriction, or at least a superfluity: Since to live is to make fiction, what need to disguise the world as another, alternate one? At the same time strict reportage, with its prohibition against invention, imposes its own aesthetically intolerable demands. Sleepless Nights, an alchemical tour de force, reports by inventing and invents by reporting. It continues to remind us how the novel can become richer by permitting itself the resources of essay, journal, memoir, prose poem, chronicle. It is a commonplace that every book needs to find its own form, but how many do? "

― Elizabeth Hardwick , Sleepless Nights

11 " A murder is a challenge, an embarrassment, to the inner life of the dead one, almost a dishonor, like other violent events that may come upon you without warning. It is not certain that you may not have in some careless or driven way chosen to put yourself in the path of a murderer. "

― Elizabeth Hardwick , Sleepless Nights

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

― Elizabeth Hardwick , Sleepless Nights

13 " Farewell to Kentucky and our agreeable vices. We go to bed early, but because of whiskey seldom with a clear head. We are fond of string beans and thin slices of salty ham. When I left home my brother said: It will be wonderful if you make a success of life, then you can follow the races. Farewell "

― Elizabeth Hardwick , Sleepless Nights

14 " If only one knew what to remember or pretend to remember. Make a decision and what you want from the lost things will present itself. You can take it down like a can from a shelf. Perhaps. "

― Elizabeth Hardwick , Sleepless Nights

15 " -and he flew in to her from the clutter of Somerville, the compost heap behind the Harvard Yard. "

― Elizabeth Hardwick , Sleepless Nights

16 " Sometimes she appears to be thinking there has been a miscalculation in the political universe. Dragons with seven heads and ten horns: were they not seen this year? A leopard came out of the sea and sank back down. But patience, patience. "

― Elizabeth Hardwick , Sleepless Nights