Quote

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

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Shirley Hazzard
Age: 85 †
Born: 1931
Born: January 30
Died: 2016
Died: December 12
Author
Novelist
Writer
Sydney
NSW
Letting
Plot
Sand
Holes
Bottom
Superstition
Talk
Superstitions
Like
Hole
Bags

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Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.
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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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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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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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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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Human beings need unhappiness at least as much as they need happiness.
Shirley Hazzard
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What you fear most will happen to you - that is the law.
Shirley Hazzard
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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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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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Nothing creates such untruth in you as the wish to please.
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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 wasn't convinced a shop girl would know the word 'Oedipal.
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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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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
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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?
Shirley Hazzard
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The tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.
Shirley Hazzard
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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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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
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In England, life is a long process of composing oneself.
Shirley Hazzard