Elizabeth Hardwick

In Sleepless Nights a woman looks back on her life—the parade of people, the shifting background of place—and assembles a scrapbook of memories, reflections, portraits, letters, wishes, and dreams. An inspired fusion of fact and invention, this beautifully realized, hard-bitten, lyrical book is not only Elizabeth Hardwick's finest fiction but one of the outstanding contributions to American literature of the last fifty years.

Sleepless Nights

Shrini S

** spoiler alert **
           “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.”

Submission to the powerful is a redundancy and very fatiguing and boring in the end.

His large melancholy skull only dimly remembered his celebrated stands as stud.

EVERYTHING groans under treachery.

She sighed behind her smile, with the resignation of experience, the harem resignation.

Envy is not the vice of the frozen intellectual.

How can it seize the mind when boredom arrives before it, always ahead of time, ready?

I often think about bachelors. A life of pure decision, of thoughtful calculations, every inclination honored. They go about on their own, nicely accompanied in their singularity by the companion of possibility.

Why should it be an objection that he is the things he has the talent to do rather than the summation of what he has finished?

He lives on mimicry, mimicry of the style he would practice if he had more money.

his snobbery was detailed and full of quirks, like that of people living in provincial capitals, or foreigners living in Florence or Cairo.

She came upon simplicities the way others came upon debts, naturally—and so baked tedious home-made bread, cooked dim soups from fresh vegetables, and stitched up her dresses out of Pakistani bedspreads.

Only those women with money can violate the laws of probability. And no matter what they do it will make sense. It is either a regression or a rebirth.

It is not the substance but the form that matters. The license, the will...the property rights, income tax...the cousins, the funerals...the photographs!

New alliances among this restless people were like the rearrangement of familiar furniture.

one fact assumes the next.

Sleepless Nights

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