Shirley Hazzard Quotes & Sayings

Human beings need unhappiness at least as much as they need happiness. — Shirley Hazzard

Yet decency nagged at their reluctant hearts; and they acknowledged that, too, in unconscious phrases
'I fail to understand ... ', 'I cannot bring myself to overlook ... ', 'Tolerance is all very well up to a point ... '
as if they had tried the ways of magnanimity but found them too exigent. — Shirley Hazzard

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

Going to Europe, someone had written, was about as final as going to heaven. A mystical passage to another life, from which no-one returned the same. Those returning in such ships were invincible, for they had managed it and could reflect ever after on Anne Hathaway's Cottage or the Tower of London with a confidence that did generate at Sydney. There was nothing mythic at Sydney; momentous objects, beings and events all occurred abroad or in the elsewhere of books. — Shirley Hazzard

But tears are not, like blood, shed by all involuntarily and according to the same determinants. And I had come to wonder, from the cauterized state of my own emotions then, whether those who have suppressed or diverted the course of strong feeling are sometimes left immune, with nothing more than just such superficial traces of what was once a great affliction. [p. 78] — Shirley Hazzard

There is balance in life, but not fairness. — Shirley Hazzard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One can only discover what has already come into existence. — Shirley Hazzard

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

In the circle where I was raised, I knew of no one knowledgeable in the visual arts, no one who regularly attended musical performances, and only two adults other than my teachers who spoke without embarrassment of poetry and literature - both of these being women. As far as I can recall, I never heard a man refer to a good or a great book. I knew no one who had mastered, or even studied, another language from choice. And our articulate, conscious life proceeded without acknowledgement of the preceding civilisations which had produced it. — Shirley Hazzard

The tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts. — Shirley Hazzard

He worked in Interim Reports, before being upgraded to Annual Reports. — Shirley Hazzard

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

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

In England, life is a long process of composing oneself ... — Shirley Hazzard

One would always want to think of oneself as being on the side of love, ready to recognize it and wish it well -but, when confronted with it in others, one so often resented it, questioned its true nature, secretly dismissed the particular instance as folly or promiscuity. Was it merely jealousy, or a reluctance to admit so noble and enviable a sentiment in anyone but oneself? — Shirley Hazzard

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

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

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

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

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

What you fear most will happen to you - that is the law. — Shirley Hazzard

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

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

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

When you realize someone is trying to hurt you, it hurts less."
"Unless you love them. — Shirley Hazzard

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

She was coming to look on men and women as fellow survivors; well-dissemblers of their woes, who, with few signals of grief, had contained, assimilated, or just put to use their own destruction. Of those who had endured the worst, not all behaved nobly or consistently. But all, involuntarily, became part of a deeper assertion to life.
Though the dissolution of love created no heroes, the process itself required some heroism. There was the risk that endurance might appear enough of an achievement. That risk had come up before. — Shirley Hazzard

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

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

Perhaps if we lived with less physical beauty we would develop our true natures more. — Shirley Hazzard

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

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

While Norah described to me her plans for carpets and curtains, or showed me the sample of bedspread material she had hung over a chair to see if she could live with it. When I began to know her, I wondered if their courtship had been, for her, something of the same
my brother draped over a chair for the statutory length of time, to see if she could live with him. In that case she might have noticed that he did not really go with the surroundings; perhaps she did see this, but knew that he would fade to a better match. — Shirley Hazzard

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

Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life. — Shirley Hazzard

Nothing creates such untruth in you as the wish to please. — Shirley Hazzard

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

Although exalted in Organizational rank, they were not remarkable men. First-class minds, being interested in the truth, tend to select other first-class minds as companions. Second-class minds, on the other hand, being interested in themselves, will select third-class comrades in order to maintain the illusion of superiority. — Shirley Hazzard

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

We take our bearings from the wrong landmark, wish that when young we had studied the stars - name the flowers for ourselves and the deserts after others. When the territory is charted, its eventual aspect may be quite other than what was hoped for. One can only say, it will be a whole - a region from which a few features, not necessarily those that seemed prominent at the start, will stand out in clear colours. Not to direct, but to solace us; not to fix our positions, but to show us how we came. — Shirley Hazzard

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

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

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

The universal odour of bookshop, closed all night on the mildews of its ranked treasures, brought a past life before him - as is said to happen in drowning. But how, he wondered, entering and taking up a book, and even breathing it in to sustain remembrance, could one ever verify or explode the myth, except by drowning. — Shirley Hazzard

Madness might sometimes give access to a kind of knowledge. But was not a guarantee. — Shirley Hazzard

Since the moment of the United Nations' inception, untold energies have been expended by governments not only toward the exclusion of persons of principle and distinction from the organization's leading positions, but toward the installation of men whose character and affiliations would as far as possible preclude any serious challenge to governmental sovereignty. — Shirley Hazzard

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

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

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

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

I wasn't convinced a shop girl would know the word 'Oedipal. — Shirley Hazzard

Although the sufferings of children are the worst, being inextinguishable
children themselves 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. [p. 13] — Shirley Hazzard

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

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

Caro sat without speaking, turning toward him her look that was neither sullen nor expectant but soberly attentive; and, once, a glance in which tenderness and apprehension were great and indivisible, giving unbearable, excessive immediacy to the living of these moments. Paul had seen that look before, when they first lay down together at the inn beyond Avebury Circle. — Shirley Hazzard

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

Sometimes, as now, her heart twisted and broke under his determination to wound her. At others, she was almost convinced that she felt nothing more for him, that he had overdrawn on her endurance: then she would stay silent for awhile, almost at peace, beyond his reach, not knowing whether she had been utterly vanquished or become completely invincible. However, it required merely some slight attention on his part to restore all her apprehensions - for these extremes of feeling only existed within the compass of her love."
"In One's Own House — Shirley Hazzard

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

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

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