Shirley Hazzard

"Her life, her long life, so she was thinking at this moment, had reached some point--not of completeness, perhaps, but of sufficiency. Although she had often been grieved by her own actions and those of others, she could hardly think of anything she wished undone. This was not from any sense of the perfection of the whole but from a now manifest continuity--and possibly because the imperfections had been so numerous that it would not be possible to subtract them and have anything left to assess. If she had sometimes been made aware that she was less rancorous and less infirm than many others, or more passionately anxious to understand, she attributed this to propitious circumstances, to the favourable conditions of her youth, the good influences of her friends and family. It was this benevolently directed course of her life that she now felt she could discern."

The Evening of the Holiday by Shirley Hazzard
Penguin Books, Ringwood,Victoria, 1969
Page 111

Shirley Hazzard

"Looking at Luisa, Tancredi wondered: How can you bear it, this memory, this recollecting of things utterly and unthinkably past? He himself was already finding it intolerable to remember--not merely the people he would never speak with again, or the houses in which he could never hope to see them, but fragments of mood, light, sensation, which he couldn't recapture and which, revealing themselves to him only in the subsequent act of remembering, then seemed to remain permanently and to accumulate significance in direct proportion to their increasing remoteness in his experience. The very word experience, at that moment, was more poignant to him than grief or love."

The Evening of the Holiday by Shirley Hazzard
Penguin Books, Ringwood,Victoria, 1969
Page 97