Shirley Hazzard

It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to…

— 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…

— 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…

— 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…

— 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…

— 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…

— 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…

— 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…

— 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…

— Shirley Hazzard

The United Nations emerged as a temple of official good intentions, a place where governments might - without abating their transgressions -…

— Shirley Hazzard

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

— Shirley Hazzard

Did you ever notice how easy it is to forgive a person any number of faults for one endearing characteristic, for a…

— Shirley Hazzard

“... I was often, later on, to act out with Giaconda a circumspection I did not feel: her abundance made others reticent;…

— Shirley Hazzard

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

— Shirley Hazzard

In the circle where I was raised, I knew of no one knowledgeable in the visual arts, no one who regularly attended…

— Shirley Hazzard

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

— Shirley Hazzard

“But tears are not, like blood, shed by all involuntarily and according to the same determinants. And I had come to wonder,…

— Shirley Hazzard

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

— Shirley Hazzard

At first, there is something you expect of life. Later, there is what life expects of you. By the time you realize…

— Shirley Hazzard