Quotes from 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.

Chief Coordinator of DALTO – the Department of Aid to the Less technically Oriented, working to induce backwards nations to come forwards.

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

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.

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.

Did you love Paul Ivory? Yes. I suppose it ended badly. Yes. You must have been very unhappy. I died, and Adam resurrected me.

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

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.

My wife killed herself. He said, My wife took her life, like a rhyme. Do you blame yourself? She had often said it, that she would. She'd had every kind of treatment. Eventually it becomes hard to know how to handle it. Like Dora: I can always die, always die. Caro said, There is the damage on both sides.

He asked, Is there someone else in love with you? You're in luck, sir, there's been a cancellation.

The satisfaction to Christian in withholding compassion from Caro had sprung directly from her need, her poverty.

In a long pause he was made to feel her superior strength, and the fact that she had been withholding it for years out of charity.

Her great weapon was her weakness, the massive deterrent to which all deferred.

Caro told Una, Josie's belief in her innocence is her warrant for doing harm. Una said, Like America.

Nothing creates untruth in you as the wish to please.

What Josie took for exposure on Caro's part had been an offering of trust - a test the girl had failed, over and over. Trust would be offered repeatedly, but not indefinitely.

When you realize someone is trying to hurt you, it hurts less.

He, who considered himself a man, had become, with his first wife, vulnerable as an intimidated child. She acted on him like a wasting disease: all healthy links to life were infidelities to be rescinded.

There are those, too, who befriend the weak because they feel themselves unworthy of the strong. Because they cannot bring themselves to honour abilities greater than their own.

It would only be polite to ask about herself, her life, her parents. Social obligation weighted Ted Tice as he lay with one arm about her naked shoulders, for he did not want her to come alive with longings and belongings of her own, or to add to his consciousness the details of one more life.

Adam put the paper down and said, I never like to see government spelt with a large G.

He said, If you knew your beauty. Even the cat listened. Margaret said, If I did, what then? You'd set the world singing. They knew he meant, You would find a man who truly loved you.

Memories cool to different temperatures at different speeds.

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, in the flesh.