Shirley Hazzard quotes:

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.

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

Since the moment of the United Nations' inception, untold energies have been expended by governments not only toward the exclusion of persons of principle and distinction from the organization's leading positions, but toward the installation of men whose character and affiliations would as far as possible preclude any serious challenge to governmental sovereignty.

Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to imagination or to intelligence, to love than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right.

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.

Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead.

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

Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.

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

One would always want to think of oneself as being on the side of love, ready to recognize it and wish it well -but, when confronted with it in others, one so often resented it, questioned its true nature, secretly dismissed the particular instance as folly or promiscuity. Was it merely jealousy, or a reluctance to admit so noble and enviable a sentiment in anyone but oneself?

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

... one doesn't really profit from experience; one merely learns to predict the next mistake.

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.

Americans' great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization.

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.

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?

Going to Europe, someone had written, was about as final as going to heaven. A mystical passage to another life, from which no-one returned the same. Those returning in such ships were invincible, for they had managed it and could reflect ever after on Anne Hathaway's Cottage or the Tower of London with a confidence that did generate at Sydney. There was nothing mythic at Sydney; momentous objects, beings and events all occurred abroad or in the elsewhere of books.

Human beings need unhappiness at least as much as they need happiness.

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.

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.

I think that one is constantly startled by the things that appear before you on the page when you're writing.

I wasn't convinced a shop girl would know the word 'Oedipal.

in thoughts one keeps a reserve of hope, in spite of everything. You cannot say good-bye in imagination. That is something you can only do in actuality ...

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

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.

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.

Marriage is like democracy - it doesn't really work, but it's all we've been able to come up with ...

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

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.

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.

The tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.

There is balance in life, but not fairness.

What you fear most will happen to you - that is the law.

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.

When you realize someone is trying to hurt you, it hurts less." "Unless you love them.