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

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

- Shirley Hazzard

Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.

- Shirley Hazzard

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.…

- Shirley Hazzard

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

- Shirley Hazzard

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

- Shirley Hazzard

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 …

- Shirley Hazzard

Children seldom have a proper sense of their own tragedy, discounting and keeping hidden the true horrors of their short lives, humbly imagining real…

- Shirley Hazzard

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

- Shirley Hazzard