In love there are two things - bodies and words.

Oates’s line compresses romantic experience into two intertwined registers: the physical (bodies) and the linguistic (words). It suggests that love is never purely one or the other—desire, touch, and presence are inseparable from the stories lovers tell, the promises they make, and the meanings they assign to intimacy. The dash functions like a blunt clarification, implying a hard-earned realism: love is enacted through embodiment, but also negotiated through speech, silence, and interpretation. The pairing can also hint at tension—words can seduce, mislead, or fail, while bodies can communicate what language cannot. In Oates’s fiction, such dualities often expose how intimacy is shaped by power, vulnerability, and miscommunication.