She realized that being starved for words was the same as being starved for food, because both left a hollow place inside you, a place you needed filled to make it through another day. Rachel remembered how growing up she’d thought living on a farm with just a father was as lonely as you could be. (130)
Interpretation
The quote highlights the importance of words for emotional and spiritual nourishment, equating their absence to physical hunger.
In this quote, Ron Rash conveys the idea that a lack of words and communication leaves individuals feeling empty and isolated, similar to the physical hunger experienced without food. The speaker reflects on their past loneliness, drawing a parallel between the emotional void created by insufficient expression and the solitude felt in a physically barren environment, such as a farm. This emphasizes the significance of language and connection in fulfilling one's emotional needs.
In practice
In a speech about communication, one might use this quote to emphasize the necessity of expressing one's thoughts.
The woman doesn't look up. It's as if she's deaf. Maybe she is. Maybe she's like the Cambodian women I've read about, the ones who witnessed so many atrocities that they have willed themselves blind. Maybe that's what you have to do sometimes to survive. You kill off part of yourself, your hearing or eyesight, your capacity for hope.
Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the ability to create a narrative that, though lacking a novel's length, satisfies the reader.
It struck her how eating was a comfort during a hard time because it reminded you that there had been other days, good days, when you’d eaten the same thing. Reminded you there were good days in life, when precious little else did. (268)
I remember nothing of this, no ambulance rides, nothing. Nothing between switching out the bedside lamp and the sudden indignity of rebirth: the slaps, the brightness, the tubing, the speed, the urgent insistence that I be choked back into breathing life. I have felt so sorry for babies ever since.
I don’t think of work as work and play as play. It’s all living.
What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn’t come every day.
Twenty-five years ago I couldn`t walk down the street without being recognized. Now I can put a cap on, walk anywhere and no one pays me any attention. They don`t ask me about my movies and they don`t ask me about my salad dressing because they don`t know who I am. Am I happy about this? You bet.
You gotta know when it's time to hang up. But when I finally go, let me go out on stage, my perfect ending. Don't let me go when I'm sick or asleep. Let me be in motion.
Before undergoing a surgical operation, arrange your temporal affairs. You may live.
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