The Transit of Venus Quotes

“When you realize someone is trying to hurt you, it hurts less."
"Unless you love them.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“Dora sat on a corner of the spread rug, longing to be assigned some task so she could resent it.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“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.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“The sweetness that all longed for night and day. Some tragedy might be idly guessed at--loss or illness. She had the luminosity of those about to die.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“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.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“Her eyes were enlarged and faded with discovering what, by common human agreement, is better undivulged.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“Caro was coming round to the fact of unhappiness: to a realization that Dora created unhappiness and the she was bound to Dora.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“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.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“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.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“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.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“I see that you are highly defensive." . . .
Caro said, "I withhold my analysis of your own attitude.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“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.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“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.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“I wasn't convinced a shop girl would know the word 'Oedipal.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“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.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“Did you love Paul Ivory?"
"Yes."
"I suppose it ended badly."
"Yes."
"You must have been very unhappy."
"I died, and Adam resurrected me.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“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.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus