"People need dreams, there's as much nourishment in 'em as food"
About this Quote
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.
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.
Quote Details
| Topic | Motivational |
|---|
More Quotes by Dorothy
Add to List
