Home > Author > Shirley Hazzard
1 " He was familiar enough with pleasure to know it might become jaded or reluctant; but joy was literally foreign to him, a word he would never easily pronounce, an exhilaration that had some other reckless nationality. For this reason, Caro's wholeness in love, her happiness in it, made her exotic. "
― Shirley Hazzard , The Transit of Venus
2 " ... 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
3 " They walked off on the earthy path, laughing not quite naturally, for they could hardly help being pleased by the momentary attention of descending passengers and by their own almost meritorious youth. "
― Shirley Hazzard , The Great Fire
4 " . . . solitude, which is held to be cause of eccentricity, in fact imposes excessive normality, and least in public . . . [p. 7] "
5 " 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. "
6 " 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. "
7 " Dora sat on a corner of the spread rug, longing to be assigned some task so she could resent it. "
8 " 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. "
9 " 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. "
10 " 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] "
11 " ...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. "
12 " 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. "
13 " At the other end of the room the three old men discussed infirmities; exchanging symptoms in undertones as boys might speak of lust. "
14 " I said, "Some people do know more than others. That contributes to the impression that someone, somewhere,knows the whole thing." [p. 38] "
15 " Her eyes were enlarged and faded with discovering what, by common human agreement, is better undivulged. "
16 " Caro was coming round to the fact of unhappiness: to a realization that Dora created unhappiness and the she was bound to Dora. "
17 " 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. "
18 " We take our bearings from the wrong landmark, wish that when young we had studied the stars - name the flowers for ourselves and the deserts after others. When the territory is charted, its eventual aspect may be quite other than what was hoped for. One can only say, it will be a whole - a region from which a few features, not necessarily those that seemed prominent at the start, will stand out in clear colours. Not to direct, but to solace us; not to fix our positions, but to show us how we came. "
19 " 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] "
20 " Women can be divided, more or less, into cows and shrews, and the shrews are to be avoided. [p. 74] "
