Shirley Hazzard > Quotes

“Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.”
― Shirley Hazzard

“When you realize someone is trying to hurt you, it hurts less."
"Unless you love them.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“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

“Dora sat on a corner of the spread rug, longing to be assigned some task so she could resent it.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“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

“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, The Transit of Venus

“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 the state of missing, is sometimes the simplest way to preserve love. [p. 56]”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon

“Sometimes, as now, her heart twisted and broke under his determination to wound her. At others, she was almost convinced that she felt nothing more for him, that he had overdrawn on her endurance: then she would stay silent for awhile, almost at peace, beyond his reach, not knowing whether she had been utterly vanquished or become completely invincible. However, it required merely some slight attention on his part to restore all her apprehensions - for these extremes of feeling only existed within the compass of her love."

"In One's Own House”
― Shirley Hazzard, Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories

“But, with unintelligible nostalgia for a life she had never lived, knew that all would have been subtly and profoundly different had her husband greatly loved her.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“She was coming to look on men and women as fellow-survivors: well-dissemblers of their woes, who, with few signals of grief, had contained, assimilated, or put to use their own destruction. Of those who had endured the worst, not all behaved nobly or consistently. but all, involuntarily, became part of some deeper assertion of life.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“... although the sufferings of children are the worst, being inextinguishable--children themselves 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. [p. 13]”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon

“At the other end of the room the three old men discussed infirmities; exchanging symptoms in undertones as boys might speak of lust.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“Men go through life telling themselves a moment must come when they will show what they're made of. And the moment comes, and they do show. And they spend the rest of their days explaining that was neither the moment nor the true self.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“Her eyes were enlarged and faded with discovering what, by common human agreement, is better undivulged.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“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, The Bay of Noon

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

“I see that you are highly defensive." . . .
Caro said, "I withhold my analysis of your own attitude.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“Yet decency nagged at their reluctant hearts; and they acknowledged that, too, in unconscious phrases -- 'I fail to understand...', 'I cannot bring myself to overlook...', 'Tolerance is all very well up to a point...' -- as if they had tried the ways of magnanimity but found them too exigent.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon

“He had seen how people came a cropper by giving way to impulse. It was to his judiciousness, at every turn, that he owed the fact that nothing terrible had ever happened to him.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“Yet her physical beauty was as strong a part of her character ... Its first and lasting impression was one of vitality and endurance. That is to say, of power: a power as self-contained, as unoppressive as that of a splendid tree. [p. 10]”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon

“I was moved, too, to see her excited as a child--but no, for there is no childhood excitement to equal the adult journey to the beloved.”
― Shirley Hazzard

“Paul said, 'You always had some contempt for me.'
'Yes.'
'And love too.'
'Yes.' A flicker over her stare was the facial equivalent of a shrug. 'Now you have a wife to give you both.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“...while Norah described to me her plans for carpets and curtains, or showed me the sample of bedspread material she had hung over a chair to see if she could live with it. When I began to know her, I wondered if their courtship had been, for her, something of the same -- my brother draped over a chair for the statutory length of time, to see if she could live with him. In that case she might have noticed that he did not really go with the surroundings; perhaps she did see this, but knew that he would fade to a better match.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon

“They lived under supervision, a life without men. Dora knew no men. You could scarcely see how she might meet one, let alone come to know.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“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, The Transit of Venus

“My need of your words: for such closeness there should be a word beyond love."

Helen, to Leith, in "The Great Fire”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire

“Caro was coming round to the fact of unhappiness: to a realization that Dora created unhappiness and the she was bound to Dora.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“I have never suffered greatly ... If you can reach fifty without a catastrophe, you've won. You've got away with it.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“Women can be divided, more or less, into cows and shrews, and the shrews are to be avoided. [p. 74]”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon

“Even Grace still imagined there might be words, the words that could reach Dora and that had so far, unaccountably, not been hit upon. Only Caro recognized that Dora's condition was exactly that: a condition, an irrational state requiring professional, or divine, intervention.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus