Cirrus@Austlit

'Much is always made of the facility with which people quote verse in Shirley Hazzard’s worlds. In a 2004 interview for The Believer, Hazzard said, “It’s quite intentional. You see, books were a theme of life, a lifetime, for whole populations who grew up before the 1950s, when television broke on the world.” In her introduction to these collected stories, Zoë Heller identifies the habit of quotation as a sign of a character’s moral worth.' (Introduction)