Daily Inspiration Quote by Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser’s line carries the weary confidence of a novelist who’s spent a lifetime watching language fail in slow motion. “Words are but the vague shadows” is a demotion: speech isn’t the thing, it’s the blur cast by the thing. The image does two jobs at once. It flatters the inner life as “volumes” - dense, private, almost library-sized - while casting public expression as thin projection, a silhouette that can’t hold detail. That’s not mystical; it’s Dreiser’s naturalism talking, the sense that human motive is vast, often unconscious, and only partly available even to the self, let alone to conversation.

The second metaphor tightens the screw: “Little audible links” suggests words are hardware, not art - utilitarian units clicking together to approximate what can’t be heard. “Chaining together” is slyly double-edged. Language connects, yes, but it also constrains; it yokes messy feeling into linear sequence, making experience behave for an audience. The “great inaudible feelings and purposes” are where Dreiser’s fiction lives: desire, shame, hunger for status, the moral alibis people manufacture. If you think of Sister Carrie or An American Tragedy, characters are driven by appetites larger than their own explanations; Dreiser builds narratives out of that mismatch.

The subtext is an argument for the novel itself. If everyday words are only shadows, then you need scale - scene, accumulation, social texture - to get closer to the “volumes we mean.” Dreiser isn’t celebrating eloquence; he’s justifying the long form as a prosthetic for human inarticulacy.