Sleepless Nights Quotes

“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

“While you are living, part of you has slipped away to the cemetery.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

“All of her news was bad and so her talk was punctuated with "of course" and "naturally.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

“Alas, the heart is not a metaphor, or at least not always a metaphor.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

“Canadians, do not vomit on me!”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

“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

“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

“The stain of place hangs on not as a birthright but as a sort of artifice, a bit of cosmetic.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

“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

“When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

“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

“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

“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

“-and he flew in to her from the clutter of Somerville, the compost heap behind the Harvard Yard.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

“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

“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

“On the battered calendar of the past, the back-glancing flow of numbers, I had imagined there would be felicitous notations of entrapments and escapes, days in the South with their insinuating feline accent, and nights in the East, showing a restlessness as beguiling as the winds of Aeolus. And myself there, marking the day with an I.

In truth, moments, months, even years were magical. Pages turned, answering prayers, and persons called out, Āre you there? The moon changed the field to the silvery lavender of daybreak.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

“On the battered calendar of the past, the back-glancing flow of numbers, I had imagined there would be felicitous notations of entrapments and escapes, days in the South with their insinuating feline accent, and nights in the East, showing a restlessness as beguiling as the winds of Aeolus. And myself there, marking the day with an I.

In truth, moments, months, even years were magical. Pages turned, answering prayers, and persons called out, Are you there? The moon changed the field to the silvery lavender of daybreak.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

“On the battered calendar of the past, the back-glancing flow of numbers, I had imagined there would be felicitous notations of entrapments and escapes, days in the South with their insinuating feline accent, and nights in the East, showing a restlessness as beguiling as the winds of Aeolus. And myself there, marking the day with an I.

In truth, moments, months, even years were magical. Pages turned, answering prayers, and persons called out, Are you there? The moon changed the field to the silvery lavender of daybreak.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

“On the battered calendar of the past, the back-glancing flow of numbers, I had imagined there would be felicitous notations of entrapments and escapes, days in the South with their insinuating feline accent, and nights in the East, showing a restlessness as beguiling as the winds of Aeolus. And myself there, marking the day with an I.

In truth, moments, months, even years were magical. Pages turned, answering prayers, and persons called out, Are you there? The moon changed the field to the silvery lavender of daybreak.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

“Perhaps here began a prying sympathy for the victims of sloth and recurrent mistakes, sympathy for the tendency of lives to obey the laws of gravity and to sink downward, falling as gently and slowly as a kite, or violently breaking, smashing.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

“She knew she could do it, that she had mastered it all, but why not ask the question: Is this all there is? Her work took on, gradually, a destructive cast, as it so often does with the greatly gifted who are doomed to repeat endlessly their own heights on inspiration.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

“Dear Folks: Do not be too proud of me. Be careful of that.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

“Sometimes the rain was beautiful. The lavender and silver streaks, gleaming in the mud, seek to be honored, to receive some words of gratitude. The kindness of damp afternoons, the solace of opening the door and finding everyone there.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

“The beginning of June was hot. I took a journey, and of course, immediately everything was new. When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist. The phlox bloomed in its faded purples; on the hillside, phallic pines. Foreigners under the arcades, in the basket shops. A steamy haze blurred the lines of the hills. A dirty, exhausting sky. Already the summer seemed to be passing away. Soon the boats would be gathered in, ferries roped to the dock.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights