Women can be divided, more or less, into cows and shrews, and the shrews are to be avoided. [p. 74]
Shirley HazzardBut that's a way to go on loving--a place, or a person. To miss it. In fact, to go away, to put yourself in the state of missing, is sometimes the simplest way to preserve love. [p. 56]
Shirley HazzardI said, "Some people do know more than others. That contributes to the impression that someone, somewhere,knows the whole thing." [p. 38]
Shirley HazzardIt mattered to us both to have some point of reference in that strange place, some means of attesting to the effect it had on us. [p. 87]
Shirley HazzardBut tears are not, like blood, shed by all involuntarily and according to the same determinants. And I had come to wonder, from the cauterized state of my own emotions then, whether those who have suppressed or diverted the course of strong feeling are sometimes left immune, with nothing more than just such superficial traces of what was once a great affliction. [p. 78]
Shirley Hazzard...while Norah described to me her plans for carpets and curtains, or showed me the sample of bedspread material she had hung over a chair to see if she could live with it. When I began to know her, I wondered if their courtship had been, for her, something of the same -- my brother draped over a chair for the statutory length of time, to see if she could live with him. In that case she might have noticed that he did not really go with the surroundings; perhaps she did see this, but knew that he would fade to a better match.
Shirley HazzardTag: courtship decorating sister-in-law
Yet decency nagged at their reluctant hearts; and they acknowledged that, too, in unconscious phrases -- 'I fail to understand...', 'I cannot bring myself to overlook...', 'Tolerance is all very well up to a point...' -- as if they had tried the ways of magnanimity but found them too exigent.
Shirley HazzardTag: decency small-mindedness
One can only discover what has already come into existence.
Shirley HazzardThe warm afternoon, the garden, the tray of empty glasses on the grass, succeeded in conveying foreboding and dissatisfaction; even the roses seemed to threaten violence, brimming over their plots of earth or arrested, scarlet, on the white wall of the house.
A Place in the Country
She had a slow, deliberate way of walking -- as if she had once been startled into precipitate action and had regretted it."
"A Place in the Country
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