Love Quote by Shirley Hazzard

Hazzard is needling the modern faith that if you can verify something, you’ve settled it. The first sentence tilts the playing field: she pairs "truth" not with evidence but with imagination, intelligence, love - faculties we tend to treat as suspicious because they can’t be audited. It’s a novelist’s provocation, but also a moral one. She’s arguing that reality is not exhausted by the measurable; the deepest accuracies often arrive through interpretation, empathy, and pattern-recognition, not through inventory.

The rhetorical move is sly. "Sometimes, surely" is both modest and impatient: a polite throat-clear that also dares you to disagree without sounding thick. Then comes the hinge: "closer". She’s not claiming imagination is truer than fact; she’s claiming facts can be the wrong neighborhood. A person can report every detail of a scene and still miss the story, the motive, the human weather. Think of how bureaucracy, journalism, and even memory can become fixated on correct particulars while committing larger distortions - the kind that flatten suffering, excuse cruelty, or mistake procedure for justice.

"To be accurate is not to be right" lands like a courtroom warning. Accuracy is a technical virtue; rightness is an ethical and intellectual one. In Hazzard’s world - shaped by war, diplomacy, and the long afterlife of political lies - the danger isn’t fantasy. It’s meticulous, self-satisfied correctness deployed to evade responsibility. The line defends art’s special jurisdiction: not to fabricate, but to reach a truth that facts alone can’t guarantee.