Shirley Hazzard famous 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.
-- Shirley Hazzard

#Writing #Needs #Nervous

Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.
-- Shirley Hazzard

#Pleasure

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

#Confusion #Tragedy #Lasts

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

#Long #England #Life Is

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

Human beings need unhappiness at least as much as they need happiness.
-- Shirley Hazzard

#Needs #Unhappiness #Humans

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

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

#Girl #Shops

Perhaps if we lived with less physical beauty we would develop our true natures more.
-- Shirley Hazzard

#Beauty #Physical Beauty

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 #Firsts #Too Late

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

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

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

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

#Mistake #Next #Profit

There is balance in life, but not fairness.
-- Shirley Hazzard

#Balance #Fairness #Life Balance

That was the trouble with experience; it taught you that most people were capable of anything, so that loyalty was never quite on firm ground -- or, rather, became a matter of pardoning offenses instead of denying their existence.
-- Shirley Hazzard

#Loyalty #People #Matter

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

#Giving #Guarantees #Might

For most people it's easier to support an eminent person in deserved disgrace than an obscure one who has been wronged.
-- Shirley Hazzard

#People #Support #Obscure

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

A poet or novelist will invent interruptions to avoid long consecutive days at the ordained page; and of these the most pernicious are other kinds of writing -- articles, lectures, reviews, a wide correspondence.
-- Shirley Hazzard

#Writing #Long #Pages

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

#Bags #Superstitions #Plot

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

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

#Lying #Wish #Please

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

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

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

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

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

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

#Civilization #America #Secret

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

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

#Hurt #Trying #Realizing

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

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

#Fear #Law

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

#Waiting #Foyers #Scene

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