70 Quotes by Shirley Hazzard

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?

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.

For most people it's easier to support an eminent person in deserved disgrace than an obscure one who has been wronged.

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

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.

A poet or novelist will invent interruptions to avoid long consecutive days at the ordained page; and of these the most pernicious are other kinds of writing -- articles, lectures, reviews, a wide correspondence.

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

Madness might sometimes give access to a kind of knowledge. But was not a guarantee.

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.