Of the widow's countless death-duties there is really just one that matters: on the first anniversary of her husband's death the widow should think I kept myself alive.
Joyce Carol OatesRead
Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Loneliness can go unnoticed until one finds meaningful connection, similar to recognizing hunger only when eating.
Joyce Carol Oates draws a poignant comparison between loneliness and starvation, emphasizing how people often underestimate the depth of their emotional needs. Just as one might not recognize physical hunger until consuming food, individuals may not realize their longing for connection and companionship until they actively seek it. This metaphor highlights the importance of relationships in fulfilling the emotional void that loneliness creates.
Themes
LonelinessRelationshipsHungerConnectionEmotion
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech on mental health awareness, one might use this quote to illustrate the importance of community.
More from Joyce Carol Oates
All quotes βI never really knew I wanted to 'be' a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became more conscious as an ideal when I was in my twenties.
Joyce Carol OatesRead
I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.
Joyce Carol OatesRead
My writing is often a way of 'bearing witness' for others who lack the education and the opportunity to tell their own stories, so I hope that my writing won't be affected too much by my personal life.
Joyce Carol OatesRead
The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.
Joyce Carol OatesRead
. . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.
Joyce Carol OatesRead
Similar quotes
One never can know the whys and the wherefores of one's passional changes.
D. H. LawrenceRead
...Grandpa's mind had left us, gone wild and wary. When I walked with him I could feel how strange it was. His thoughts swam between us, hidden under rocks, disappearing in weeds, and I was fishing for them, dangling my own words like baits and lures.
Louise ErdrichRead
She knew that it would not be easy to submit to his miserliness, or the foolishness of his premature appearance of age, or his maniacal sense of order, or his eagerness to as for everything and give nothing at all in return, but despite all this, no man was better company because no other man in the world was so in need of love.
Gabriel Garcia MarquezRead
If we stop believing in a future, if we stop doing things for something else but start doing them for now, some fundamental things change. Retirement becomes less about how much money you can squirrel away now and much more a matter of participating and contributing to your own community now so that they want to take care of you. β¦ Weβre going to move into a world where your retirement will be more secure if youβve made lots of friends with young people rather than collected lots of dollars.
Douglas RushkoffRead
The state of empathy, or being empathic, is to perceive the internal frame of reference of another with accuracy and with the emotional components and meanings which pertain thereto as if one were the person.
Carl RogersRead
You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.
Milan KunderaRead