Education Quote by Elizabeth Hardwick

Hardwick praises reading the way a hard-nosed realist might praise a good coat: not as ornament, but as equipment for surviving weather. Calling it "cheap" is more than thrift; its a quiet rebuke to a culture that treats self-improvement as a luxury brand. Reading, for her, is the most democratic of refinements: portable, scalable, available to anyone with time, stubbornness, and a library card.

The list of verbs is the engine here. "Consoles" and "distracts" admit a slightly guilty truth: we often read to get away from living. Hardwick doesnt scold that impulse; she legitimizes it. Then she pivots to "excites" and "gives you knowledge" as if to argue that escapism and education arent opposites but adjacent rooms in the same house. The subtext: the mind can be entertained into seriousness. Pleasure becomes a delivery system for insight.

Her final phrase, "a moral illumination", sharpens the claim without lapsing into piety. As a critic shaped by mid-century American letters and the bruising politics of her era, Hardwick knew how easily moral language turns to sermon or slogan. She chooses "illumination" instead: reading doesnt hand you commandments, it changes what you can see. The morality is optical, not doctrinal - a widening of sympathy, a calibration of judgment, a training in complexity. In a noisy public life hungry for certainty, Hardwick offers a quieter radicalism: attention as ethics.