Shirley Hazzard Quotes

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• 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.

  Shirley Hazzard

  Writing, Needs, Nervous

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

  Shirley Hazzard

  Confusion, Tragedy, Lasts

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• Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.

  Shirley Hazzard

  Pleasure, Has Beens

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

  Shirley Hazzard

  Needs, Unhappiness, Humans

  Shirley Hazzard (2000). “Greene on Capri: A Memoir”, p.12, Macmillan

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• 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.

  Shirley Hazzard

  Expectations, Too Late, Firsts

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• Did you ever notice how easy it is to forgive a person any number of faults for one endearing characteristic, for a certain style, or some commitment to life - while someone with many good qualities is insupportable for a single defect if it happens to be a boring one?

  Shirley Hazzard

  Commitment, Numbers, Forgiving

  Shirley Hazzard (2004). “The Evening of the Holiday: A Novel”, p.114, Macmillan

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

  Shirley Hazzard

  Religious, Void, Belief

  Shirley Hazzard (1991). “Countenance of truth: the United Nations and the Waldheim case”, Vintage

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• The United Nations emerged as a temple of official good intentions, a place where governments might - without abating their transgressions - go to church; a place made remote - by agreed untruth and procedural complexity, and by tedium itself - from the risk of intense public involvement.

  Shirley Hazzard

  Government, Risk, Church

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• Since the moment of the United Nations' inception, untold energies have been expended by governments not only toward the exclusion of persons of principle and distinction from the organization's leading positions, but toward the installation of men whose character and affiliations would as far as possible preclude any serious challenge to governmental sovereignty.

  Shirley Hazzard

  Character, Men, Organization

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• I think that one is constantly startled by the things that appear before you on the page when you're writing.

  Shirley Hazzard

  Writing, Thinking, Pages

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• There is balance in life, but not fairness.

  Shirley Hazzard

  Balance, Fairness, Life Balance

  Shirley Hazzard (1988). “Cliffs of Fall: And Other Stories”, Penguin Group USA

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• 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.

  Shirley Hazzard

  Bye, Imagination, Spite

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• 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.

  Shirley Hazzard

  Over You, Authority, Advantage

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• 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?

  Shirley Hazzard

  Love, Thinking, Wish

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• 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.

  Shirley Hazzard

  Mean, Thinking, Color

  Shirley Hazzard (1981). “The Bay of Noon”, Berkley Publishing Group

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

  Shirley Hazzard

  Marriage, Democracy, Able

  Shirley Hazzard (1988). “Cliffs of Fall: And Other Stories”, Penguin Group USA

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

  Shirley Hazzard

  Lying, Wish, Please

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• Italians are never punctual; the café, the convenient place to wait, absolves them from that. There is no question of hanging about, no looking lost and unwanted or even disreputable, as there is in hotel lobbies or the foyers of restaurants. One just sits and enjoys the scene, and waits.

  Shirley Hazzard

  Hotel Lobby, Waiting, Foyers

  Shirley Hazzard (2004). “The Evening of the Holiday: A Novel”, p.30, Macmillan

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

  Shirley Hazzard

  Fear, Law, Happens

  Shirley Hazzard (2004). “Cliffs of Fall: And Other Stories”, p.24, Macmillan

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• 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

  Leadership, Literature, Moral

  Shirley Hazzard (2016). “We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think: Selected Essays”, p.67, Columbia University Press

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

  Shirley Hazzard

  Girl, Shops, Knows

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• 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.

  Shirley Hazzard

  Inspirational, Children, Real

  Shirley Hazzard (2003). “The Bay of Noon: A Novel”, p.13, Macmillan

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• 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.

  Shirley Hazzard

  Loss, Night, Tragedy

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

  Shirley Hazzard

  Civilization, America, Secret

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

  Shirley Hazzard

  Imagination, Facts, Sometimes

  Shirley Hazzard (2004). “The Evening of the Holiday: A Novel”, p.95, Macmillan

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