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Book: The Transit of Venus
Quotes of Book: The Transit of Venus
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  1. 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.
    book-quotelovelosssadness

  2. 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 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 risk that endurance might appear enough of an achievement. That risk had come up before.
    book-quotetruthwisdom

  3. 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.
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  4. 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.
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  5. 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.
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  6. Shirley Hazzard _ The Transit of Venus

    I wasn't convinced a shop girl would know the word 'Oedipal.
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  7. 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.
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  8. 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.
    book-quotelovepleasure

  9. Shirley Hazzard _ The Transit of Venus

    I see that you are highly defensive." . . .Caro said, "I withhold my analysis of your own attitude.
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  10. 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.
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  11. 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.
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  12. 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.
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