Top 35 Shirley Hazzard Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “What you fear most will happen to you – that is the law.”

— Shirley Hazzard

2. “There is balance in life, but not fairness.”

— Shirley Hazzard

3. “Men go through life telling themselves a moment must come when they will show what they’re made of. And the moment comes, and they do show. And they spend the rest of their days explaining that was neither the moment nor the true self.”

— Shirley Hazzard

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

— Shirley Hazzard

5. “The tragedy is not that love doesn’t last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.”

— Shirley Hazzard

6. “Marriage is like democracy – it doesn’t really work, but it’s all we’ve been able to come up with...”

— Shirley Hazzard

7. “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.”

— Shirley Hazzard

8. “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

9. “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.”

— Shirley Hazzard

10. “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

11. “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?”

— Shirley Hazzard

12. “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

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

— Shirley Hazzard

14. “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.”

— Shirley Hazzard

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

— Shirley Hazzard

16. “I think that one is constantly startled by the things that appear before you on the page when you’re writing.”

— Shirley Hazzard

17. “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

18. “I have never suffered greatly... If you can reach fifty without a catastrophe, you’ve won. You’ve got away with it.”

— Shirley Hazzard

19. “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

20. “He was familiar enough with pleasure to know it might become jaded or reluctant; but joy was literally foreign to him, a word he would never easily pronounce, an exhilaration that had some other reckless nationality. For this reason, Caro’s wholeness in love, her happiness in it, made her exotic.”

— Shirley Hazzard

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

— Shirley Hazzard

22. “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.”

— Shirley Hazzard

23. “Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.”

— Shirley Hazzard

24. “Human beings need unhappiness at least as much as they need happiness.”

— Shirley Hazzard

25. “He worked in Interim Reports, before being upgraded to Annual Reports.”

— Shirley Hazzard

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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.”

— Shirley Hazzard

30. “The universal odour of bookshop, closed all night on the mildews of its ranked treasures, brought a past life before him – as is said to happen in drowning. But how, he wondered, entering and taking up a book, and even breathing it in to sustain remembrance, could one ever verify or explode the myth, except by drowning.”

— Shirley Hazzard

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

— Shirley Hazzard

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

— Shirley Hazzard

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

— Shirley Hazzard

34. “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.”

— Shirley Hazzard

35. “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.”

— Shirley Hazzard

36. “And the thread of her happiness was no stronger than the clasp of her fingers on his coat, no longer than this last mile of their journey.”

— Shirley Hazzard

37. “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 life to the person most excluded from it – in order to readmit her to the intimacy, though not the life.”

— Shirley Hazzard

38. “He had the complexion, lightly webbed, of outdoor living and indoor drinking, and was a high, handsome man who might have been cruel.”

— Shirley Hazzard