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

Categorized in : Long Writing Novelists

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

moral literature leadership

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.

Shirley Hazzard

teacher book art

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

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

Shirley Hazzard

shops girl knows

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

real inspirational children

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

tragedy loss night

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

Shirley Hazzard

secret civilization america

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

imagination sometimes facts

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.

Shirley Hazzard

wisdom europe book

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

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

Shirley Hazzard

england life-is long

Perhaps if we lived with less physical beauty we would develop ou... by Shirley Hazzard

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

Shirley Hazzard

physical-beauty true-nature beauty

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

bags superstitions plot

When you realize someone is trying to hurt you, it hurts less." "... by Shirley Hazzard

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

Shirley Hazzard

realizing hurt trying

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

Shirley Hazzard

obscure support people

Madness might sometimes give access to a kind of knowledge. But w... by Shirley Hazzard

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

Shirley Hazzard

guarantees might giving

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

loyalty matter people