Top 54 Shirley Hazzard Quotes

#1. It mattered to us both to have some point of reference in that strange place, some means of attesting to the effect it had on us. [p. 87]

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #49801
#2. I have a superstition that if I talk about plot, it's like letting sand out of a hole in the bottom of a bag.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #65490
#3. Solitude, which is held to be cause of eccentricity, in fact imposes excessive normality, and least in public ... [p. 7]

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #66269
#4. A poet or novelist will invent interruptions to avoid long consecutive days at the ordained page; and of these the most pernicious are other kinds of writing
articles, lectures, reviews, a wide correspondence.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #111444
#5. But that's a way to go on loving
a place, or a person. To miss it. In fact, to go away, to put yourself in the state of missing, is sometimes the simplest way to preserve love. [p. 56]

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #116467
#6. What you fear most will happen to you - that is the law.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #132726
#7. I think that one is constantly startled by the things that appear before you on the page when you're writing.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #191828
#8. Her eyes were enlarged and faded with discovering what, by common human agreement, is better undivulged.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #219300
#9. Marriage is like democracy - it doesn't really work, but it's all we've been able to come up with ...

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #248687
#10. The sweetness that all longed for night and day. Some tragedy might be idly guessed at-loss or illness. She had the luminosity of those about to die.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #253167
#11. That was the trouble with experience; it taught you that most people were capable of anything, so that loyalty was never quite on firm ground
or, rather, became a matter of pardoning offenses instead of denying their existence.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #267735
#12. They walked off on the earthy path, laughing not quite naturally, for they could hardly help being pleased by the momentary attention of descending passengers and by their own almost meritorious youth.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #374831
#13. He had the complexion, lightly webbed, of outdoor living and indoor drinking, and was a high, handsome man who might have been cruel.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #455770
#14. Human beings need unhappiness at least as much as they need happiness.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #469873
#15. It is the impulse of our century, with its nearly religious belief in magnitude, to fling an institution into every void.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #480278
#16. In England, life is a long process of composing oneself ...

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #486457
#17. Children seldom have a proper sense of their own tragedy, discounting and keeping hidden the true horrors of their short lives, humbly imagining real calamity to be some prestigious drama of the grown-up world.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #487962
#18. My need of your words: for such closeness there should be a word beyond love."
Helen, to Leith, in "The Great Fire

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #515851
#19. Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #538483
#20. I wasn't convinced a shop girl would know the word 'Oedipal.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #548592
#21. Svoboda was not a brilliant man. He was a man of what used to be known as average and is now known as above-average intelligence.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #559601
#22. Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #610967
#23. Nothing, Ismet thought, makes a more fanatical official than a Latin. Organization is alien to their natures, but once they get a taste for it they take to it like drink. They claim to be impulsive, but they're the most bureaucratic of all, whatever they say.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #617978
#24. At the other end of the room the three old men discussed infirmities; exchanging symptoms in undertones as boys might speak of lust.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #637948
#25. Madness might sometimes give access to a kind of knowledge. But was not a guarantee.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #653668
#26. Even Grace still imagined there might be words, the words that could reach Dora and that had so far, unaccountably, not been hit upon. Only Caro recognized that Dora's condition was exactly that: a condition, an irrational state requiring professional, or divine, intervention.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #659458
#27. When you realize someone is trying to hurt you, it hurts less."
"Unless you love them.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #825327
#28. Americans' great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #846365
#29. But, with unintelligible nostalgia for a life she had never lived, knew that all would have been subtly and profoundly different had her husband greatly loved her.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #883714
#30. The United Nations emerged as a temple of official good intentions, a place where governments might - without abating their transgressions - go to church; a place made remote - by agreed untruth and procedural complexity, and by tedium itself - from the risk of intense public involvement.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #912206
#31. It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #923345
#32. She had a slow, deliberate way of walking
as if she had once been startled into precipitate action and had regretted it."
"A Place in the Country

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #1040193
#33. I said, "Some people do know more than others. That contributes to the impression that someone, somewhere,knows the whole thing." [p. 38]

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #1043910
#34. Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to imagination or to intelligence, to love than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #1120176
#35. I was often, later on, to act out with Giaconda a circumspection I did not feel: her abundance made others reticent; her openness evoked discretion.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #1124585
#36. Reverie by the open window in the sweet futility of a mild evening was yet to strike the Australian male as a requirement. (There would be the question of fly screens, for one thing.)

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #1174117
#37. At first, there is something you expect of life. Later, there is what life expects of you. By the time you realize these are the same, it can be too late for expectations. What we are being, not what we are to be. They are the same thing.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #1197919
#38. He worked in Interim Reports, before being upgraded to Annual Reports.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #1207467
#39. I never had, or wished for, power over you. That isn't true, of course. I wanted the greatest power of all. but not advantage, or authority.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #1297417
#40. Dora sat on a corner of the spread rug, longing to be assigned some task so she could resent it.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #1366359
#41. Did you ever notice how easy it is to forgive a person any number of faults for one endearing characteristic, for a certain style, or some commitment to life - while someone with many good qualities is insupportable for a single defect if it happens to be a boring one?

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #1444510
#42. I was moved, too, to see her excited as a child
but no, for there is no childhood excitement to equal the adult journey to the beloved.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #1470563
#43. The tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #1484850
#44. There is balance in life, but not fairness.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #1529516
#45. I see that you are highly defensive." ...
Caro said, "I withhold my analysis of your own attitude.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #1610747
#46. He was familiar enough with pleasure to know it might become jaded or reluctant; but joy was literally foreign to him, a word he would never easily pronounce, an exhilaration that had some other reckless nationality. For this reason, Caro's wholeness in love, her happiness in it, made her exotic.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #1626522
#47. For most people it's easier to support an eminent person in deserved disgrace than an obscure one who has been wronged.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #1652183
#48. One doesn't really profit from experience; one merely learns to predict the next mistake.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #1699607
#49. When people say of their tragedies, 'I don't often think of it now,' what they mean is it has entered permanently into their thoughts, and colors everything.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #1699999
#50. Did you love Paul Ivory?"
"Yes."
"I suppose it ended badly."
"Yes."
"You must have been very unhappy."
"I died, and Adam resurrected me.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #1735887
#51. In thoughts one keeps a reserve of hope, in spite of everything. You cannot say good-bye in imagination. That is something you can only do in actuality ...

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #1801554
#52. Nothing creates such untruth in you as the wish to please.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #1820212
#53. One can only discover what has already come into existence.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #1840512
#54. Perhaps if we lived with less physical beauty we would develop our true natures more.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard Quotes #1859964

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