Quotes from Shirley Hazzard

Grace Marian Thrale, forty-three years old, stood silent in a hotel doorway in her worn blue coat and looked at the cars and the stars, with the roar of existence in her ears. And like any great poet or tragic sovereign of antiquity, cried on her Creator and wondered how long she must remain on such an earth.

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

The rage - at fate, at God. Not merely being helpless, but in someone's - something's - power. I've always detested any sense of power over me.

I nearly resent these things I have described, because they are life without you. [It] is so long. If I could only see you.

How should you hope for mercy, rendering none?

The truly terrible things are those one cannot alter, to which one is indefinitely committed.

That he had loved [her] more, and far more, than he had cared for anyone else gave her stature[.]

Paul resented this historic position she had established for herself in the momentum of his life, and because of it would have liked to see her broken.

He had seen how people grew cruel with telling themselves of their own compassion: nothing made you harder than that.

He thought most men would hardly dare to touch her, or only with anger, because she would not pretend anything was casual.

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

Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.

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.

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.

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

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.

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]

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.

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.

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 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 some deeper assertion of life.

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.

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

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