Shirley Hazzard
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"Shirley Hazzard" is 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 (novel)/The Great Fire won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.

[http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2003.html "National Book Awards – 2003"]. National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-27.

(With acceptance speech by Hazzard, introduction by Antonya Nelson (dead link 2012-03-27), and essays by Julie Barer and Cecily Patterson from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)

If you enjoy these quotes, be sure to check out other famous novelists! More Shirley Hazzard on Wikipedia.

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.

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

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

One would always want to think of oneself as being on the side of love, ready to recognize it and wish it well /but, when confronted with it in others, one so often resented it, questioned its true nature, secretly dismissed the particular instance as folly or promiscuity. Was it merely jealousy, or a reluctance to admit so noble and enviable a sentiment in anyone but oneself?

Do you ever notice, asked Luisa, "how easy it is to forgive a person any number of faults for one endearing characteristic . . . while someone with many good qualities is insupportable for a single defect if it happens to be a boring one?"

It's a nervous work. The state that you need to write is the state that others are paying large sums to get rid of.