. . . solitude, which is held to be cause of eccentricity…

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…

— Shirley Hazzard

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

— Shirley Hazzard

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

— Shirley Hazzard

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,…

— Shirley Hazzard

“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…

— Shirley Hazzard

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

— Shirley Hazzard

“... although the sufferings of children are the worst, being inextinguishable--children themselves seldom have a proper sense of their own tragedy, discounting and keeping…

— Shirley Hazzard

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

— Shirley Hazzard

“Dark had meant Dora, had meant words and events sordid with self. Struggling to the light from Dora's darkness, Caro had acquired conscience and…

— Shirley Hazzard

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

— Shirley Hazzard

“Sometimes, as now, her heart twisted and broke under his determination to wound her. At others, she was almost convinced that she felt nothing…

— Shirley Hazzard

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

— Shirley Hazzard

“Occasion revived an illusion of discovery, as if one woke in a strange room to wonder afresh not only where but who one was;…

— Shirley Hazzard

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

— Shirley Hazzard

Since the moment of the United Nations' inception, untold energies have been expended by governments not only toward the exclusion of persons of principle…

— Shirley Hazzard