Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.
Interpretation
Loneliness can be exacerbated when one is physically close to someone but emotionally distant.
This quote by Germaine Greer emphasizes the profound pain that can accompany loneliness when one is in the presence of someone who no longer engages or connects with them. It highlights how physical proximity can create a deceptive sense of companionship, while emotional disconnection deepens feelings of isolation and heartache.
In practice
In a speech about mental health, one could use this quote to illustrate the hidden struggles some people face even when surrounded by others.
It is often falsely assumed, even by feminists, that sexuality is the enemy of the female who really wants to develop these aspects of her personality, and this is perhaps the most misleading aspect of movements like the National Organization of Women. It was not the insistence upon her sex that weakened the American woman student's desire to make something of her education, but the insistence upon a passive sexual role
A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.
The only perfect love to be found on earth is not sexual love, which is riddled with hostility and insecurity, but the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love. This is not to say that fathers have no place, for father-love, with its driving for self-improvement and discipline, is also essential to survival, but that uncorrected father-love, father-love as it were practiced by both parents, is a way to annihilation.
Women live lives of continual apology. They are born and raised to take the blame for other people's behavior. If they are treated without respect, they tell themselves that they have failed to earn respect. If their husbands do not fancy them, it is because they are unattractive.
The wedding is the chief ceremony of the middle-class mythology, and it functions as the official entrée of the spouses to their middle-class status. This is the real meaning of saving up to get married. The young couple struggles to set up an image of comfortable life which they will be forced to live up to in the years that follow.
Guilt is one side of a nasty triangle; the other two are shame and stigma. This grim coalition combines to inculpate women themselves of the crimes committed against them.
Marriage is the alliance of two people, one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other who never forgets them.
It wasn't torpor that kept her - she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed.
There is nothing wrong with avoiding people who hurt you.
The more one loves a mistress, the more one is ready to hate her.
When you don't have much money, you worry that they'll just put you in the ground someplace and your loved ones won't know where you are.
You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.
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