The Bay of Noon Quotes

“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]”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon

“... 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]”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon

“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.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon

“I said, "Some people do know more than others. That contributes to the impression that someone, somewhere,knows the whole thing." [p. 38]”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon

“. . . solitude, which is held to be cause of eccentricity, in fact imposes excessive normality, and least in public . . . [p. 7]”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon

“...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 surroundings; perhaps she did see this, but knew that he would fade to a better match.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon

“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]”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon

“One can only discover what has already come into existence.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon

“Women can be divided, more or less, into cows and shrews, and the shrews are to be avoided. [p. 74]”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon

“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 us; not to fix our positions, but to show us how we came.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon

“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]”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon

“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]”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon

“... 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.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon

“In matters of importance there is no such thing as ‘best avoided’ — avoidance is only a vacuum that something else must fill. Everything is the inevitable.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon

“When you are ill you
can only be yourself – whereas in an office one is required always to be somewhat false, at least when one is subordinate. The preference for a serious disease over office life struck me, even at the time.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon

“The fact is that life as a permanent fixture of a town like this can be a pretty lonely business.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon

“Love is the most conditional thing there is. A word, a tone of voice, a moment's silence can change it irrevocably.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon

“It’s too late for me to live in those countries, away from the discomforts of home . . .”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon

“True love,” said Justin Tulloch, “is the cultivation of forgetfulness. And don’t you forget it.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon

“Time is said to belong to the young, but it is only the young who can be so prodigal of it, looking forward to faroff events and wishing away the intervening weeks or months as if they were no more than an impediment to a goal.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon

“But chronological prestige is tenacious: once attained, it can’t be shed; it increases moment by moment, day by day, pressing its honours on you until you are lavishly, overly endowed with them. Until you literally sink under them.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon

“Like many men who are compulsively cruel to their womenfolk, he also shed tears at the cinema, and showed a disproportionate concern for insects.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon