Shirley Hazzard Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  46 Copy quote

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

  Shirley Hazzard

  Confusion, Tragedy, Lasts

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

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

  Shirley Hazzard

  Civilization, America, Secret

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

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

  Shirley Hazzard

  Mistake, Next, Profit

  Shirley Hazzard (2004). “Cliffs of Fall: And Other Stories”, p.13, Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

• Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.

  Shirley Hazzard

  Pleasure, Has Beens

  15 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

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

  Shirley Hazzard

  Girl, Shops, Knows

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Shirley Hazzard

  Plot, Bags, Superstitions

  4 Copy quote

• In the circle where I was raised, I knew of no one knowledgeable in the visual arts, no one who regularly attended musical performances, and only two adults other than my teachers who spoke without embarrassment of poetry and literature — both of these being women. As far as I can recall, I never heard a man refer to a good or a great book. I knew no one who had mastered, or even studied, another language from choice. And our articulate, conscious life proceeded without acknowledgement of the preceding civilisations which had produced it.

  Shirley Hazzard

  Teacher, Art, Book

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  11 Copy quote

• Going to Europe, someone had written, was about as final as going to heaven. A mystical passage to another life, from which no-one returned the same. Those returning in such ships were invincible, for they had managed it and could reflect ever after on Anne Hathaway's Cottage or the Tower of London with a confidence that did generate at Sydney. There was nothing mythic at Sydney; momentous objects, beings and events all occurred abroad or in the elsewhere of books.

  Shirley Hazzard

  Wisdom, Book, Europe

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

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