emptiness Quotes

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.”

“I see the damage and pain of hard years. I see the emptiness and desperation of existence without hope. I see a young life that has been too long.”

“Whatever made me the way I am left me hollow, empty inside, unable to feel. It doesn’t seem like a big deal. I’m quite sure most people fake an awful lot of everyday human contact. I just fake all of it.”

“He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack.”

“But the longer I’ve lived, the more I’ve lost what’s inside me—and ended up empty.”

“Everything is there, but there are no parts.”

“I thought it would make me feel better to have the man vanished from the earth, but I actually felt a massive, frightening hollowness open up in my chest. I had spent my life comparing myself to my father, and now he was gone.”

“He started asking me, ‘What are you thinking?’ I never knew what to say. My head was empty and I liked it that way. Then he began to tell me what I might be thinking. ‘You seem sad today,’ he’d say, or ‘Today, you seem puzzled about something.’ Of course I was sad and puzzled. I was eighteen, it was spring, and I was behind bars.”

“For whoso thinks that wisdom dwells with him, That he alone can speak or think aright, Such oracles are empty breath when tried.”

“I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man’s jurisdiction.”

“Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.”

“When a woman’s wave rises she feels she has an abundance of love to give, but when it falls she feels her inner emptiness and needs to be filled up with love.”

“Formerly, his heart had been as a locked casket with its treasure inside; but now the casket was empty, and the lock was broken.”

“Empty words almost echo within themselves”

“I longed for the birth, for the sensation of the baby’s head pressing down through me, for that unmistakable, pure, painful sensation of bringing a child into the world, albeit with pain, with tears. I wanted those tears, I wanted that pain. I did not want the pain of emptiness, the tears of a barren, scarred womb.”

“Is not my sorrow deep, having no bottom?”

“We like having the walls and roofs over our heads. Otherwise we’d just be wandering in an open field of dust somewhere. [...] I imagine that’s what being full-dead is like. An emptiness vast and absolute.”

“Burnout is a state of emptiness, to be sure, but it does not result from giving all I have: it merely reveals the nothingness from which I was trying to give in the first place.”

“There is an emptiness inside of me -- a void that will never be filled. No one in your life will ever love you as your mother does. There is no love as pure, unconditional and strong as a mother’s love. And I will never be loved that way again.”

“The hard work of sowing seed in what looks like perfectly empty earth has, as every farmer knows, a time of harvest. All suffering, all pain, all emptiness, all disappointment is seed: sow it in God and he will, finally, bring a crop of joy from it.”

“The town looked lonely, and it made me sad. Somehow the magic was gone, without her.”

“Then she would laugh like the very spirit of fun; only in her laugh there was something missing. What it was, I find myself unable to describe. I think it was a certain tone, depending upon the possibility of sorrow—morbidezza, perhaps. She never smiled.”

“Hollowness: that I understand. I’m starting to believe that there isn’t anything you can do to fix it. That’s what I’ve taken from the therapy sessions: the holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mold yourself through the gaps.”

“All the space without you in it, is empty.”

“Part of the problem . . . is that everyone is in such a hurry. . . . People haven’t found meaning in their lives, so they’re running all the time looking for it. They think the next car, the next house, the next job. Then they find these things are empty, too, and they keep running.”

“He had wandered through the streets for hours, neither knowing nor caring where he was going. All he knew was that he couldn’t return to the empty rooms of the house, couldn’t look at the things they had touched and held and known with him.”

“We couldn’t imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm. ”

“There was only the enormous, empty prairie, with grasses blowing in waves of light and shadow across it, and the great blue sky above it, and birds flying up from it and singing with joy because the sun was rising. And on the whole enormous prairie there was no sign that any other human being had ever been there.”

“A man as he ought to be: that sounds to us as insipid as ‘a tree as it ought to be.’ ”

“Her daughter’s absence was very painful at first. But three times a week she would receive a letter from her, and on the other days she would write to her. She would also walk in her garden, or read a little, and in this way she filled the long, empty hours.”

“A ugly thing, that us what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing [...] and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have paused cannot stand you.”

“I feel all the same things when I do things alone as when Ole Golly was here. The bath feels hot, the bed feels soft, but I feel there’s a funny little hole in me that wasn’t there before, like a splinter in your finger, but this is somewhere above my stomach.”

“But right there in his own back garden was the great big box that the fridge came in. Crispin went and peeped inside the empty box... and he saw that it was full.”

“But the box was empty. There was nothing inside at all.”

“It was the lonely quiet of the village with all our people gone. Houses empty. Doors banging. Fires out. No smoke rising. Starving dogs dragging themselves from door to door. Beasts out in the meadow lowing to be milked... Comfort, it felt like the end of the world.”

“Da Souza himself felt unwanted, left behind in this ghost town of a place, among the empty houses, with a wife and three children to support on the proceeds from a store where nobody shopped any more.”

“The flickering pine knot in the corner fireplace held blue flames. They had no warmth. There was loneliness and emptiness inside. When Mammy Sally came, the warmth would spark out in the fire, and the shadows would bring sleep.”

“Finally, my hope, because here is the part of your dating life where you no longer date to find someone to fill the emptiness. You look for someone to share the fullness that you both already are.”

“What it was like to shut one’s eyes, lose consciousness, plunge into emptiness for a few hours and then wake up and find oneself the same as before, linked with the threads of one’s life again, Agilulf could not know...”

“His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.”