Quotes from Shirley Hazzard

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

He had seen how people came a cropper by giving way to impulse. It was to his judiciousness, at every turn, that he owed the fact that nothing terrible had ever happened to him.

Yet her physical beauty was as strong a part of her character ... Its first and lasting impression was one of vitality and endurance. That is to say, of power: a power as self-contained, as unoppressive as that of a splendid tree. [p. 10]

The warm afternoon, the garden, the tray of empty glasses on the grass, succeeded in conveying foreboding and dissatisfaction; even the roses seemed to threaten violence, brimming over their plots of earth or arrested, scarlet, on the white wall of the house. A Place in the Country

Caro was coming round to the fact of unhappiness: to a realization that Dora created unhappiness and the she was bound to Dora.

They lived under supervision, a life without men. Dora knew no men. You could scarcely see how she might meet one, let alone come to know.

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.

Women can be divided, more or less, into cows and shrews, and the shrews are to be avoided. [p. 74]

Paul said, 'You always had some contempt for me.' 'Yes.' 'And love too.' 'Yes.' A flicker over her stare was the facial equivalent of a shrug. 'Now you have a wife to give you both.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.