Shirley Hazzard

Chronological prestige is tenacious: once attained, it can't be shed; it increased moment by moment, day by day, pressing its honours on you until you are lavishly, overly endowed with them. Until you literally sink under them.

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

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

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

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