Shirley Hazzard

“It mattered to us both to have some point of reference in that strange place, some means of attesting to the effect it had on us. [p. 87]”

“But tears are not, like blood, shed by all involuntarily and according to the same determinants. And I had come to wonder, from the cauterized state of my own emotions then, whether those who have suppressed or diverted the course of strong feeling are sometimes left immune, with nothing more than just such superficial traces of what was once a great affliction. [p. 78]”

“Women can be divided, more or less, into cows and shrews, and the shrews are to be avoided. [p. 74]”

“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]”

“I said, "Some people do know more than others. That contributes to the impression that someone, somewhere,knows the whole thing." [p. 38]”

“... 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]”

“... I was often, later on, to act out with Giaconda a circumspection I did not feel: her abundance made others reticent; her openness evoked discretion.”

“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]”

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

“...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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“Her eyes were enlarged and faded with discovering what, by common human agreement, is better undivulged.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Did you love Paul Ivory?""Yes.""I suppose it ended badly.""Yes.""You must have been very unhappy.""I died, and Adam resurrected me.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“I see that you are highly defensive." . . .Caro said, "I withhold my analysis of your own attitude.”

“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.”

“Caro sat without speaking, turning toward him her look that was neither sullen nor expectant but soberly attentive; and, once, a glance in which tenderness and apprehension were great and indivisible, giving unbearable, excessive immediacy to the living of these moments. Paul had seen that look before, when they first lay down together at the inn beyond Avebury Circle.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Dark had meant Dora, had meant words and events sordid with self. Struggling to the light from Dora's darkness, Caro had acquired conscience and equilibrium like a profound, laborious education. Exercise of principle would always require more from her than from persons nurtured in it, for she had learned it by application of will. Caro would never do the right thing without knowing it, as some could.”

“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.”

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

“Caro was coming round to the fact of unhappiness: to a realization that Dora created unhappiness and the she was bound to Dora.”

“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.”

“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”

“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.”

“My need of your words: for such closeness there should be a word beyond love."Helen, to Leith, in "The Great Fire”

“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.”

“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.”