Quote

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

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Shirley Hazzard
Age: 85 †
Born: 1931
Born: January 30
Died: 2016
Died: December 12
Author
Novelist
Writer
Sydney
NSW
Inspirational
Proper
Discounting
Sense
Grown
Prestigious
True
Keeping
Humbly
Children
Tragedy
Horrors
Real
Horror
Imagining
World
Drama
Calamity
Short
Seldom
Lives
Hidden

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Human beings need unhappiness at least as much as they need happiness.
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Nothing creates such untruth in you as the wish to please.
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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.
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Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to imagination or to intelligence, to love than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right.
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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.
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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.
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What you fear most will happen to you - that is the law.
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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.
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In England, life is a long process of composing oneself.
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Americans' great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization.
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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?
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Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.
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The tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.
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Great literature is like moral leadership everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I wasn't convinced a shop girl would know the word 'Oedipal.
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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.
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