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06e9c2a
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When you realize someone is trying to hurt you, it hurts less." "Unless you love them." --
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Shirley Hazzard |
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715d2d6
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Sometimes, as now, her heart twisted and broke under his determination to wound her. At others, she was almost convinced that she felt nothing more for him, that he had overdrawn on her endurance: then she would stay silent for awhile, almost at peace, beyond his reach, not knowing whether she had been utterly vanquished or become completely invincible. However, it required merely some slight attention on his part to restore all her apprehe..
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Shirley Hazzard |
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e78fe05
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I never had, or wished for, power over you. That isn't true, of course. I wanted the greatest power of all. but not advantage, or authority.
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Shirley Hazzard |
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0286cda
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But, with unintelligible nostalgia for a life she had never lived, knew that all would have been subtly and profoundly different had her husband greatly loved her.
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Shirley Hazzard |
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f434cea
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although the sufferings of children are the worst, being inextinguishable--children themselves 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. [p. 13]
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Shirley Hazzard |
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6375b5a
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Dora sat on a corner of the spread rug, longing to be assigned some task so she could resent it.
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Shirley Hazzard |
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fab9bfc
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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.
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small-mindedness
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Shirley Hazzard |
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2c05f80
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She was coming to look on men and women as fellow-survivors: well-dissemblers of their woes, who, with few signals of grief, had contained, assimilated, or put to use their own destruction. Of those who had endured the worst, not all behaved nobly or consistently. but all, involuntarily, became part of some deeper assertion of life.
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Shirley Hazzard |
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85cebc8
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solitude, which is held to be cause of eccentricity, in fact imposes excessive normality, and least in public . . . [p. 7]
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Shirley Hazzard |
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eabe0da
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But 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]
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Shirley Hazzard |
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23d0aea
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My need of your words: for such closeness there should be a word beyond love." Helen, to Leith, in "The Great Fire"
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Shirley Hazzard |
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b893d1b
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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 sur..
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decorating
sister-in-law
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Shirley Hazzard |
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7b3ee31
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He had seen how people came a cropper by giving way to impulse. It was to his judiciousness, at every turn, that he owed the fact that nothing terrible had ever happened to him.
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Shirley Hazzard |
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d184f8c
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At the other end of the room the three old men discussed infirmities; exchanging symptoms in undertones as boys might speak of lust.
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ailments
similies
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Shirley Hazzard |
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14f7ab5
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I said, "Some people do know more than others. That contributes to the impression that someone, somewhere,knows the whole thing." [p. 38]"
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Shirley Hazzard |
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494ca59
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The 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.
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Shirley Hazzard |
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7534200
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Her eyes were enlarged and faded with discovering what, by common human agreement, is better undivulged.
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Shirley Hazzard |
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c3b72d6
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Caro was coming round to the fact of unhappiness: to a realization that Dora created unhappiness and the she was bound to Dora.
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Shirley Hazzard |
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0aaa14a
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They lived under supervision, a life without men. Dora knew no men. You could scarcely see how she might meet one, let alone come to know.
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Shirley Hazzard |
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b6825e4
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We take our bearings from the wrong landmark, wish that when young we had studied the stars - name the flowers for ourselves and the deserts after others. When the territory is charted, its eventual aspect may be quite other than what was hoped for. One can only say, it will be a whole - a region from which a few features, not necessarily those that seemed prominent at the start, will stand out in clear colours. Not to direct, but to solace..
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Shirley Hazzard |
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daf4810
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Yet her physical beauty was as strong a part of her character ... Its first and lasting impression was one of vitality and endurance. That is to say, of power: a power as self-contained, as unoppressive as that of a splendid tree. [p. 10]
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Shirley Hazzard |
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6facdc7
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Women can be divided, more or less, into cows and shrews, and the shrews are to be avoided. [p. 74]
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Shirley Hazzard |
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ecb663d
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Paul said, 'You always had some contempt for me.' 'Yes.' 'And love too.' 'Yes.' A flicker over her stare was the facial equivalent of a shrug. 'Now you have a wife to give you both.
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Shirley Hazzard |
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715c9b5
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He was familiar enough with pleasure to know it might become jaded or reluctant; but joy was literally foreign to him, a word he would never easily pronounce, an exhilaration that had some other reckless nationality. For this reason, Caro's wholeness in love, her happiness in it, made her exotic.
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love
pleasure
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Shirley Hazzard |
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938728e
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Dark had meant Dora, had meant words and events sordid with self. Struggling to the light from Dora's darkness, Caro had acquired conscience and equilibrium like a profound, laborious education. Exercise of principle would always require more from her than from persons nurtured in it, for she had learned it by application of will. Caro would never do the right thing without knowing it, as some could.
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Shirley Hazzard |
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dc4a3db
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I see that you are highly defensive." . . . Caro said, "I withhold my analysis of your own attitude."
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Shirley Hazzard |
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048c77b
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I was often, later on, to act out with Giaconda a circumspection I did not feel: her abundance made others reticent; her openness evoked discretion.
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Shirley Hazzard |
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3aba414
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Even Grace still imagined there might be words, the words that could reach Dora and that had so far, unaccountably, not been hit upon. Only Caro recognized that Dora's condition was exactly that: a condition, an irrational state requiring professional, or divine, intervention.
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Shirley Hazzard |
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19dc4ba
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I wasn't convinced a shop girl would know the word 'Oedipal.
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Shirley Hazzard |
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df28bb6
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But 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]
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Shirley Hazzard |
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b6cd0c3
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It 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]
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Shirley Hazzard |
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79201c5
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They walked off on the earthy path, laughing not quite naturally, for they could hardly help being pleased by the momentary attention of descending passengers and by their own almost meritorious youth.
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Shirley Hazzard |
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4369033
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Reverie by the open window in the sweet futility of a mild evening was yet to strike the Australian male as a requirement. (There would be the question of fly screens, for one thing.)
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Shirley Hazzard |
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a0dec28
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Occasion revived an illusion of discovery, as if one woke in a strange room to wonder afresh not only where but who one was; to shed assumptions, even certainties.
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Shirley Hazzard |
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7f7029e
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She had a slow, deliberate way of walking -- as if she had once been startled into precipitate action and had regretted it." " "
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Shirley Hazzard |
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d3e80b0
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I have never suffered greatly ... If you can reach fifty without a catastrophe, you've won. You've got away with it.
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Shirley Hazzard |
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427fd0a
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Svoboda was not a brilliant man. He was a man of what used to be known as average and is now known as above-average intelligence.
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Shirley Hazzard |
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0d0c2ae
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Chief Coordinator of DALTO - the Department of Aid to the Less technically Oriented, working to induce backwards nations to come forwards.
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Shirley Hazzard |
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e35b887
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He worked in Interim Reports, before being upgraded to Annual Reports.
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Shirley Hazzard |
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f423e65
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Although exalted in Organizational rank, they were not remarkable men. First-class minds, being interested in the truth, tend to select other first-class minds as companions. Second-class minds, on the other hand, being interested in themselves, will select third-class comrades in order to maintain the illusion of superiority.
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Shirley Hazzard |
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7ed69f6
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Nothing, Ismet thought, makes a more fanatical official than a Latin. Organization is alien to their natures, but once they get a taste for it they take to it like drink. They claim to be impulsive, but they're the most bureaucratic of all, whatever they say.
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Shirley Hazzard |
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8df2d6a
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Did you love Paul Ivory?" "Yes." "I suppose it ended badly." "Yes." "You must have been very unhappy." "I died, and Adam resurrected me."
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Shirley Hazzard |
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8d97565
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Caro sat without speaking, turning toward him her look that was neither sullen nor expectant but soberly attentive; and, once, a glance in which tenderness and apprehension were great and indivisible, giving unbearable, excessive immediacy to the living of these moments. Paul had seen that look before, when they first lay down together at the inn beyond Avebury Circle.
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Shirley Hazzard |
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0b3b1b9
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She was coming to look on men and women as fellow survivors; well-dissemblers of their woes, who, with few signals of grief, had contained, assimilated, or just put to use their own destruction. Of those who had endured the worst, not all behaved nobly or consistently. But all, involuntarily, became part of a deeper assertion to life. Though the dissolution of love created no heroes, the process itself required some heroism. There was the ..
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truth
wisdom
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Shirley Hazzard |