Shirley Hazzard Quotes

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.

Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.

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

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

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.

There is balance in life, but not fairness.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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