Daily Inspiration Quote by Dorothy Gilman

Gilman smuggles a radical claim into plainspoken comfort: dreams are not dessert, they are dinner. The line works because it refuses the usual hierarchy where “practical” needs get to be real and “imaginative” needs are a luxury you indulge after the bills are paid. By yoking dreams to nourishment, she reframes aspiration as survival technology - something that keeps a person metabolically human when circumstances are grinding them down.

The apostrophe in “’em” matters. It’s intimate, unpretentious, the kind of phrasing you’d hear in a kitchen rather than a lecture hall. That tonal choice is the subtext: Gilman isn’t arguing from a podium; she’s insisting from lived experience, the way someone does when they’ve seen what happens to people who stop imagining a future. “As much” is also a quiet provocation. It’s not “almost as much,” not “in a different way.” It’s parity. The sentence demands we treat hope, plans, and inner narratives as materially consequential.

As a novelist, Gilman is also defending the cultural value of story itself. Fiction becomes a pantry: a place to store possibilities, rehearse courage, and keep identity from shrinking to whatever the day required. In the long 20th century - marked by war, economic shocks, domestic constraint, and rapid social change - that’s not sentimental. It’s a subtle argument that resilience isn’t just grit; it’s the ability to picture something else and keep moving toward it. Dreams, here, are calories for the will.