Emptiness Quotes - Page 16

• Pain is always preferable to numbness.

  Scott Anderson

  Pain, Numbness, Detachment

  Scott Anderson (1999). “Triage: A Novel”, p.179, Simon and Schuster

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• First, the desert is the country of madness. Second, it is the refuge of the devil, thrown out into the "wilderness of upper Egypt" to "wander in dry places." Thirst drives man mad, and the devil himself is mad with a kind of thirst for his own lost excellence--lost because he has immured himself in it and closed out everything else. So the man who wanders into the desert to be himself must take care that he does not go mad and become the servant of the one who dwells there in a sterile paradise of emptiness and rage.

  Thomas Merton

  Country, Men, Egypt

  Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.21, Macmillan

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• Outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers' beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass.

  Sylvia Plath

  Baby, Stars, Wall

  Sylvia Plath (2000). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962”, Anchor

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• Who took away the part so essential to the whole Left you a hollow body Skin and bone.

  Tracy Chapman

  Numbness, Skins, Body

  Song: Remember The Tinman, Album: New Beginning, 1995

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• Nobody believes the identities we've made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now - as though people had true cores once, but hucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow.

  Douglas Coupland

  Believe, Numbness, People

  "Girlfriend in a Coma". Book by Douglas Coupland, 1998.

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• It's important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there's a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there's a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there's a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance.

  Susanna Kaysen

  Distance, Fall, Numbness

  "Girl, Interrupted". Book by Susanna Kaysen, 1994.

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• Your superhuman power was to be able not to feel. Is it there inside everybody, this self that comes out while you are in captivity? You become the closest approximation of yourself that can tolerate living there.

  Heather O'Neill

  Numbness, Self, Able

  Heather O'Neill (2014). “Lullabies for Little Criminals”, p.139, Hachette UK

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• My experience of emptiness is that it is alive with the possibility of everything waiting to be born

  Mary Martin

  Waiting, Alive, Possibility

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• And so I am feeling numb. It's a curious feeling, and I get it all the time. My attention to the world around me disappears, and something starts to hum inside my head. Far off, voices try to bump up against me, but I repel them. My ears fill up with water and I focus on the humming in my head.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Numbness, Voice, Water

  Marya Hornbacher (2009). “Madness: A Bipolar Life”, p.15, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• There is a feeling of disbelief that comes over you, that takes over, and you kind of go through the motions. You do what you're supposed to do, but in fact you're not there at all.

  Frederick Barthelme

  Numbness, Over You, Feelings

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• They give me a shot and a handful of pills to swallow. I stare at the thin red wall of my inner eyelid and listen to my skin and I can't be sure how the medication is affecting me. I can't remember how I'm supposed to feel. I can't remember my name. I have never seen my face.

  Will Christopher Baer

  Wall, Numbness, Names

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• 'Emptiness' means empty of a separate self. It is full of everything, full of life. The word emptiness should not scare us. It is a wonderful word. To be empty does not mean non-existent. Emptiness is the ground of everything. Thanks to emptiness, everything is possible.

  Nhat Hanh

  Mean, Self, Scare

  Thich Nhat Hanh (2012). “Awakening of the Heart: Essential Buddhist Sutras and Commentaries”, p.421, Parallax Press

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• But there is no substance under the things I have gathered together about me. I am hollow, and my structure of pleasures and ambitions has no foundation. I am objectified in them. But they are all destined by their very contingency to be destroyed. And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am a mistake.

  Thomas Merton

  Mistake, Ambition, Together

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• Until the bitter end, the emptiness inside her was hers alone.

  Haruki Murakami

  Numbness, Bitter, Detachment

  Haruki Murakami (2011). “Kafka On The Shore”, p.426, Random House

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• This morning I suddenly catch myself: I'm not there, I'm so lost in thought, I don't know what's going on around me. Can you think yourself to death?

  Anna Kamienska

  Morning, Thinking, Numbness

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• We do not truly speak except at a distance. There is no word not severed.

  Edmond Jabes

  Distance, Numbness, Speak

  Edmond Jabès (1993). “The Book of Margins”, p.174, University of Chicago Press

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• She examined me, she looked at me critically and said, "Why are you trying to starve yourself?" To keep myself from feeling love, from feeling lust, from feeling anything at all.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Numbness, Lust, Feelings

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• We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move. We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable. We work with being, but non-being is what we use.

  Laozi

  Moving, Space, House

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• Meditation is a refocusing on symbols. It's not emptiness. We are using symbols, doorways to step from one world to another, from darkness into light, from death to immortality.

  Frederick Lenz

  Light, Meditation, Darkness

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• You can't just sit in emptiness. Even the enlightened don't sit in emptiness. We call it emptiness - but we move our mind into a world of light.

  Frederick Lenz

  Moving, Light, Mind

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• In the state of emptiness, you are the action not the performer of the action. Allow an activity or event to take precedence over your own point of view.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Views, Over You

  Frederick Lenz (1995). “Surfing the Himalayas: A Spiritual Adventure”, St Martins Press

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• Emptiness is not a mere emptiness, but rather fullness in which the distinctiveness of everything is throughly realized.

  Masao Abe

  Fullness, Mere

  Masao Abe, Steven Heine (2003). “Zen and the Modern World: A Third Sequel to Zen and Western Thought”, p.55, University of Hawaii Press

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• Advertising doesn't cause addictions. But it does create a climate of denial and it contributes mightily to a belief in the quick fix, instant gratification, the dreamworld, and escape from all pain and boredom. All of this is part of what addicts believe and what we hope for when we reach for our particular substance.... Addiction begins with the hope that something "out there" can instantly fill up the emptiness inside. Advertising is all about this false hope.

  Jean Kilbourne

  Pain, Believe, Boredom

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• I was stuck on the side of a mountain in Scotland. I was looking down on emptiness. I lay on my back and looked around in panic. I prayed to God and relaxed. I realised if I turned carefully on my front I could see bits of grass to hold on to.

  Ivor Cutler

  Scotland, Mountain, Sides

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• There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt.

  Beryl Markham

  Morning, Mean, Sleep

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.58, Open Road Media

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