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 would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting
All you have in life is your reputation: you may be very rich, but if you lose your good name, then you'll never be happy. The thought will always lurk at the back of your mind that people don't trust you.
To everyone in this Congress who still refuses to raise the minimum wage, I say this: If you truly believe you could work full-time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, go try it. If not, vote to give millions of the hardest-working people in America a raise.
So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be.
I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.
There's no way around grief and loss: you can dodge all you want, but sooner or later you just have to go into it, through it, and, hopefully, come out the other side. The world you find there will never be the same as the world you left.
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