Shirley Hazzard Quotations

Do you ever notice, asked Luisa, "how easy it is to forgive a person any number of faults for one endearing characteristic . . . while someone with many good qualities is insupportable for a single defect if it happens to be a boring one?

It's a nervous work. The state that you need to write is the state that others are paying large sums to get rid of.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to imagination or to intelligence, to love than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right.

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

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.

Human beings need unhappiness at least as much as they need happiness.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Italians are never punctual; the café, the convenient place to wait, absolves them from that. There is no question of hanging about, no looking lost and unwanted or even disreputable, as there is in hotel lobbies or the foyers of restaurants. One just sits and enjoys the scene, and waits.

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

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?

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

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 ...

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?

There is balance in life, but not fairness.

Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.

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.