Shirley Hazzard Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

At the other end of the room the three old men discussed infirmities; exchanging symptoms in undertones as boys might speak of lust.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is balance in life, but not fairness.

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]

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

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

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.

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

Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.

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

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.

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

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.

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

One can only discover what has already come into existence.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.