Shirley Hazzard Quotes

Love of love written by the broken hearted, love of life written by the dead.

I remember burying a girl fourteen years of age who had died with a ruptured appendix... I buried a good many people that I knew, some of whom I loved.

Most songs are somewhere between love and death, and mine are no exception.

As the presence of those we love is as a double life, so absence, in its anxious longing and sense of vacancy, is as a foretaste of death.

The worst day ever was when I found out my grandfather was going to die.

I've watched a lot of my friends die, everyone from John Belushi, River Phoenix to Chris Farley. It just keeps going on and on.

At a certain age, death becomes familiar to you-or a loss becomes familiar-the tragedies that are more commonplace in life.

And all the winds go sighing, for sweet things dying.

Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.

I want to be alone and work until the day my heads hits the drawing table and I'm dead. Kaput. I feel very much like I want to be with my brother and sister again. They're nowhere. I know they're nowhere and they don't exist, but if nowhere means that's where they are, that's where I want to be.

The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.

We all have that burning question about what happens if we lose somebody we love, especially if we lose them tragically. We wonder what fear was going on, we wonder if we could have reached out and touched them, held their hand, looked in their eyes, been there.

A death from a long illness is very different from a sudden death. It gives you time to say goodbye and time to adjust to the idea that the beloved will not be with you anymore.

I don't mourn the dead. I mourn the living.

I think that one of the reasons why people look towards the end of humanity is that people are afraid to die alone. If you die alone, the people you love will miss you, or if they die, you miss them - the sorrow is inevitable. When you truly love someone, the thought of losing them forever is horrible.

It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.

My dad was diagnosed with cancer, so we ended up burying him a year to the day that he was diagnosed.

I had a twin, and he didn't make it.

Going through an illness and then death of a close friend has changed my attitudes to friendship enormously.

My father passed from cancer in 2000; his brother died of cancer before that. My grandfather died of cancer.

It's the continuation of everyone's childhood to see these young children who grow up full of life, full of intelligence, full of a sense of wonder. And within an instant they're gone from this world. It's terrible.

Death remains about the one certain fact in the lives of each one of us, and there will be suffering, sorrow, and sadness next week as there was last week.

Death is always and under all circumstances a tragedy, for if it is not, then it means that life itself has become one.

My sister died in Brooklyn.