Shirley Hazzard Quotes (9 Quotes)

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.

Chronological prestige is tenacious once attained, it can't be shed it increased moment by moment, day by day, pressing its honours on you until you are lavishly, overly endowed with them. Until you literally sink under them.

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

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

It's a nervous work. The state that you need to write is the state that others are paying large sums to get rid of.

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

Do you ever notice, asked Luisa, how easy it is to forgive a person any number of faults for one endearing characteristic . . . while someone with many good qualities is insupportable for a single defect if it happens to be a boring one.

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

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