Shirley Hazzard Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Shirley Hazzard
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
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
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
It is the impulse of our century, with its nearly religious belief in magnitude, to fling an institution into every void.

Shirley Hazzard
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
Marriage is like democracy — it doesn't really work, but it's all we've been able to come up with...

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

Shirley Hazzard
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
He was so cautious — anyone would think he had a thousand years to live and didn't need to invite experience.

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

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

Shirley Hazzard
She had a slow, deliberate way of walking — as if she had once been startled into precipitate action and had regretted it.

Shirley Hazzard