They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.
Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Our emotional responses might be shaped by external circumstances, but how we choose to interact with the world is our own responsibility.
This quote from Lorrie Moore highlights the distinction between feelings that may arise from external experiences and our conscious choices in how we respond to the world around us. It suggests that numbness can be an involuntary reaction to life's hardships, but coldness is a deliberate stance that can harm relationships and our connection to others. Therefore, while we may not be able to control our initial emotional reactions, we have the power and responsibility to choose how we engage with our environment and the people we encounter.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be shared during a discussion on emotional intelligence at a workshop.
More from Lorrie Moore
All quotes βYou couldn't pretend you had lost nothing... you had to begin there, not let your blood freeze over. If your heart turned away at this, it would turn away at something greater, then more and more until your heart stayed averted, immobile, your imagination redistributed away from the world and back only toward the bad maps of yourself, the sour pools of your own pulse, your own tiny, mean, and pointless wants.
I tried not to think about my life. I did not have any good solid plans for it long-term - no bad plans either, no plans at all - and the lostness of that, compared with the clear ambitions of my friends (marriage, children, law school), sometimes shamed me. Other times in my mind I defended such a condition as morally and intellectually superior - my life was open and ready and free - but that did not make it less lonely.
She was not good on the phone. She needed the face, the pattern of eyes, nose, trembling mouth... People talking were meant to look at a face, the disastrous cupcake of it, the hide-and-seek of the heart dashing across. With a phone, you said words, but you never watched them go in. You saw them off at the airport but never knew whether there was anyone there to greet them when they got off the plane.
No matter that you anticipate a thing; you get so used to it as part of the future that its actuality, its arrival, its force and presence, startles you, takes you by surprise, as would a ghost suddenly appearing in the room wearing familiar perfume and boots.
When I was in graduate school, I had a teacher who said to me, 'Women writers should marry somebody who thinks writing is cute. Because if they really realised what writing was, they would run a mile.'
Similar quotes
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In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (December 1948) in most solemn form, the dignity of a person is acknowledged to all human beings; and as a consequence there is proclaimed, as a fundamental right, the right of free movement in search for truth and in the attainment of moral good and of justice, and also the right to a dignified life.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.
And so man, as existing transcendence abounding in and surpassing toward possibilities, is a creature of distance. Only through the primordial distances he establishes toward all being in his transcendence does a true nearness to things flourish in him.
I wore black because I liked it. I still do, and wearing it still means something to me. It's still my symbol of rebellion -- against a stagnant status quo, against our hypocritical houses of God, against people whose minds are closed to others' ideas.