Top Shirley Hazzard Quotes

Shirley Hazzard Biography

Shirley Hazzard (30 January 1931 – 12 December 2016) was an Australian-American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. She was born in Australia and also held United States citizenship.

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Shirley Hazzard Quotes

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.

Expectations, Expects, Firsts, Realize, Same, Too Late

Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.

Has Beens, Life, Longest, Pleasure, Poetry

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

Hurt, Love, Realizing, Trying, Unless

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.

Plot, Bags, Superstitions, Like, Bag

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.

Abating, Church, Government, Place, Procedural, Risk

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

Composing, England, Life Is, Long, Oneself

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

America, Civilization, Secret, Turn

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

Confusion, Lasts, Love, Tragedy

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.

Writing, Needs, Nervous, Write, Work

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.

Character, Exclusion, Governments, Inception, Men, Organization

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.

Children, Discounting, Inspirational, Real, Seldom, Sense

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.

Guessed, Loss, Luminosity, Night, Tragedy

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?

Boring, Commitment, Forgiving, Life, Number, Numbers

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

Convinced, Girl, Know, Knows, Shop, Shops

There is balance in life, but not fairness.

Balance, Fairness, Life Balance, Life

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.

Acknowledgement, Art, Book, Poetry, Raised, Teacher

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.

Actuality, Bye, Imagination, Spite, Thoughts

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

Lying, Wish, Please, Creates, Untruth

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

Beauty, Physical Beauty, True Nature, Physical, Natures

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.

Existence, Loyalty, Matter, Pardoning, People

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Shirley Hazzard Biography

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