“ 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 wo… Shirley Hazzard
“ Caro was coming round to the fact of unhappiness: to a realization that Dora created unhappiness and the she was bound to Dora. Shirley Hazzard
“ 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. Shirley Hazzard
“ I see that you are highly defensive. . . .Caro said, I withhold my analysis of your own attitude. Shirley Hazzard
“ At the other end of the room the three old men discussed infirmities; exchanging symptoms in undertones as boys might speak of lust. Shirley Hazzard
“ 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. Shirley Hazzard
“ Dora sat on a corner of the spread rug, longing to be assigned some task so she could resent it. Shirley Hazzard
“ That alas is the way it goes; Something we must rectify. Paul, not Caro, would interpret the degree of meaning in their respective lots. That had been decided, as he sat speaking intimately of his lif… Shirley Hazzard
“ Women can be divided, more or less, into cows and shrews, and the shrews are to be avoided. [p. 74] Shirley Hazzard
“ 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… Shirley Hazzard
“ 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 a… Shirley Hazzard
“ My need of your words: for such closeness there should be a word beyond love.Helen, to Leith, in The Great Fire Shirley Hazzard
“ . . solitude, which is held to be cause of eccentricity, in fact imposes excessive normality, and least in public . . . [p. 7] Shirley Hazzard
“ 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… Shirley Hazzard
“ Occasion revived an illusion of discovery, as if one woke in a strange room to wonder afresh not only where but who one was; to shed assumptions, even certainties. Shirley Hazzard
“ 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] Shirley Hazzard
“ 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 w… Shirley Hazzard
“ 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
“ 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 unoppressi… Shirley Hazzard
