Shirley Hazzard
Shirley Hazzard
Shirley Hazzardis an Australian author of fiction and non-fiction. She was born in Australia, but holds citizenship of the United Kingdom and the United States. Her 1970 novel, The Bay of Noon, was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010 and her 2003 novel The Great Fire won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth30 January 1931
CountryAustralia
loyalty people matter
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.
beauty physical-beauty true-nature
Perhaps if we lived with less physical beauty we would develop our true natures more.
long england life-is
In England, life is a long process of composing oneself ...
leadership literature moral
Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead.
teacher art book
In the circle where I was raised, I knew of no one knowledgeable in the visual arts, no one who regularly attended musical performances, and only two adults other than my teachers who spoke without embarrassment of poetry and literature — both of these being women. As far as I can recall, I never heard a man refer to a good or a great book. I knew no one who had mastered, or even studied, another language from choice. And our articulate, conscious life proceeded without acknowledgement of the preceding civilisations which had produced it.
needs unhappiness humans
Human beings need unhappiness at least as much as they need happiness.
over-you authority advantage
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.
writing thinking pages
I think that one is constantly startled by the things that appear before you on the page when you're writing.
imagination facts sometimes
Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to imagination or to intelligence, to love than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right.
civilization america secret
Americans' great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization.
loss night tragedy
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.
religious void belief
It is the impulse of our century, with its nearly religious belief in magnitude, to fling an institution into every void.
writing long pages
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.
bags superstitions plot
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.