Daily Inspiration Quote by Karen Black

Karen Black’s line lands like an offhand lament, but it’s really a diagnosis of a culture that confuses signal with connection. “Illiteracy is rampant” isn’t just about reading ability; it’s an accusation that people are losing the skills that make other people legible - attention, curiosity, the patience to decode anything longer than a slogan. Then she pivots: “People are out of communication.” Not “misinformed,” not “ignorant,” but disconnected. The phrasing matters. “Out of communication” suggests a dropped call, a broken circuit, a society surrounded by devices yet failing at the basic human work of exchanging meaning.

Coming from an actress, the subtext sharpens. Acting is literacy in emotion and subtext: listening, responding, translating interior life into something another person can feel. Black is effectively saying we’re forgetting how to read each other. It’s also a quiet critique of how public life rewards performance without comprehension - lots of talk, little understanding. The sentence pair is blunt and almost unadorned, which gives it the sting of something she’s watched happen in real time: a shift from conversation to broadcast, from shared references to private feeds, from community to comment sections.

The intent isn’t nostalgia for a bookish past; it’s warning. When literacy - textual or social - collapses, people don’t merely lose information. They lose the ability to negotiate reality together. That’s when isolation starts passing for independence, and noise starts passing for culture.