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

“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

“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

“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

“Men go through life telling themselves a moment must come when they will show what they're made of. And the moment comes, and they do show. And they spend the rest of their days explaining that was neither the moment nor the true self.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“At the other end of the room the three old men discussed infirmities; exchanging symptoms in undertones as boys might speak of lust.”
― 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

“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

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

“I have never suffered greatly ... If you can reach fifty without a catastrophe, you've won. You've got away with it.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“I wasn't convinced a shop girl would know the word 'Oedipal.”
― 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

“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

“Nothing creates untruth in you as the wish to please.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“That alas is the way it goes"; "Something we must rectify." Paul, not Caro, would interpret the degree of meaning in their respective lots. That had been decided, as he sat speaking intimately of his life to the person most excluded from it - in order to readmit her to the intimacy, though not the life.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“He had the complexion, lightly webbed, of outdoor living and indoor drinking, and was a high, handsome man who might have been cruel.”
― 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

“The rage - at fate, at God. Not merely being helpless, but in someone's - something's - power. I've always detested any sense of power over me.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“The tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“Grace Marian Thrale, forty-three years old, stood silent in a hotel doorway in her worn blue coat and looked at the cars and the stars, with the roar of existence in her ears. And like any great poet or tragic sovereign of antiquity, cried on her Creator and wondered how long she must remain on such an earth.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“In thoughts, one keeps a reserve of hope, in spite of everything. You cannot say good-bye in imagination. That is something you can only do in actuality, in the flesh.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“Memories cool to different temperatures at different speeds.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“He said, "If you knew your beauty."
Even the cat listened. Margaret said, "If I did, what then?"
"You'd set the world singing."
They knew he meant, You would find a man who truly loved you.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus