Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to imagination or to intelligence, to love than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right.
Interpretation
Truth can be more aligned with ideas and feelings than with cold facts.
In this quote, Shirley Hazzard suggests that the essence of truth may sometimes reside more in the realms of imagination, intelligence, and love rather than strictly adhering to factual accuracy. She emphasizes that being precise or factual does not necessarily equate to being correct, highlighting the complexities and nuances of understanding truth beyond mere verification.
In practice
In a discussion about the nature of truth and reality, this quote can highlight the importance of perspective.
One would always want to think of oneself as being on the side of love, ready to recognize it and wish it well -but, when confronted with it in others, one so often resented it, questioned its true nature, secretly dismissed the particular instance as folly or promiscuity. Was it merely jealousy, or a reluctance to admit so noble and enviable a sentiment in anyone but oneself?
The tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.
Men naturally rebel against the injustice of which they are victims. Thus, when plunder is organized by law for the profit of those who make the law, all the plundered classes try somehow to enter, by peaceful or revolutionary means, into the making of laws. According to their degree of enlightenment, these plundered classes may propose one of two entirely different purposes when they attempt to attain political power: Either they may wish to stop lawful plunder, or they may wish to share in it.
The infant, on opening his eyes, ought to see his country, and to the hour of his death never lose sight of it.
and never really thought I'd amount to anything. It was precisely what I wanted the whole world to think; then I could sneak in, if that's what they wanted, and sneak out again, which I did.
From the day of its birth, the anomaly of slavery plagued a nation which asserted the equality of all men, and sought to derive powers of government from the consent of the governed. Within sound of the voices of those who said this lived more than half a million black slaves, forming nearly one-fifth of the population of a new nation.
We impoverish God in our minds when we say there must be answers to our prayers on the material plane; the biggest answers to our prayers are in the realm of the unseen.
In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.
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