Emptiness Quotes - Page 25

• Sometimes, Soraya Sleeping next to me, I lay in bed and listened to the screen door swinging open and shut with the breeze, to the crickets chirping in the yard. And I could almost feel the emptiness in Soraya's womb, like it was a living, breathing thing. It had seeped into our marriage, that emptiness, into our laughs, and our love-making. And late at night, in the darkness of our room, I'd feel it rising from Soraya and setting between us. Sleeping between us. Like a newborn child.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Love, Children, Sleep

  Khaled Hosseini (2011). “The Kite Runner: Rejacketed”, p.165, A&C Black

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• There is something peculiarly dispriting about the emptiness that wells up when, in a strange city, one dials the same telephone numbers in vain.

  W. G. Sebald

  Cities, Numbers, Telephones

  W. G. Sebald (2016). “Vertigo”, p.20, New Directions Publishing

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• I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.

  William Butler Yeats

  Hate, People, Earth

  William Butler Yeats (1954). “The Letters of W.B. Yeats”

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• I told myself: 'I am surrounded by unknown things.' I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me – afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptiness?

  Guy de Maupassant

  Night, Men, Air

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• I believe that you've created a metaphorical universe in which you can express your darkest fears. In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves, and sometimes we do such a good job, we lose track of reality.

  Laurie Halse Anderson

  Jobs, Believe, Reality

  Laurie Halse Anderson (2009). “Wintergirls”, p.185, Penguin

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• His absence will haunt their hallways, and he will be a space they can't fill. And then time will pass, and the hole will be gone, like when an organ is removed and the body's fluids flow into the space it leaves. Humans can't tolerate emptiness for long.

  Veronica Roth

  Space, Long, Gone

  Veronica Roth (2014). “Divergent Collector's Edition”, p.25, Harper Collins

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• But don’t ever let yourself forget that the person you care about fills an emptiness no one else ever has and that while life with them can seriously suck at times, those moments when it doesn’t are worth all the aggravation of falling into the toilet and getting soaked when you’re half asleep.

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Fall, Aggravation, Half

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• Youth always tries to fill the void, an old man learns to live with it.

  Mark Z. Danielewski

  Men, Trying, Void

  Twitter post from Dec 01, 2011

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• Piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

  Ronald Reagan

  Inspirational Life, Purpose, Malaise

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• There won't be emptiness. Emptiness is just another idea, another illusion.

  Frederick Lenz

  Yoga, Ideas, Illusion

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• I step back further, until I feel cold tiles against my back. It is then I get the glimmer that I associate with memory. As my mind tries to settle on it, it flutters away, like ashes caught in a breeze, and I realize that in my life there is a then, a before, though before what I cannot say, and there is a now, and there is nothing between the two but a long, silent emptiness that has led me here, to me and him, in this house.

  S.J. Watson

  Memories, Two, Long

  S. J. Watson (2011). “Before I Go To Sleep: A Novel”, p.8, Harper Collins

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• This is perdition: the things to which the heart was attached pass away while the person himself, who is an eternal being, is filled with nothing but emptiness when he should have been filled with God Himself. That is why it is so very important that we turn our focus inward to the source of life that lives forever, even as we ourselves will live forever.

  Johan Oscar Smith

  Life Changing, Heart, Should Have

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• Americans are optimists. They hope they'll be wealthy someday - and they're positive they can get one more brushful of paint out of an empty can.

  Bernard Williams

  Optimistic, Optimism, Someday

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• But somehow in identifying myself as the healer, there was still a seed of both self-righteousness and defense from a kind of emptiness.

  Gangaji

  Reflection, Self, Defense

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• Idleness is emptiness; the tree in which the sap is stagnant, remains fruitless.

  Hosea Ballou

  Tree, Sap, Laziness

  "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations". Book by Kate Louise Roberts, 1922.

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• I felt totally myself, nothing like the emptiness and horrible feeling I had then [pulling out the Olympics] - no dizziness.

  Paula Radcliffe

  Feelings, Olympics, Horrible

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• When I'm with him, there is someone with me in my house of grief, someone who knows its architecture as I do, who can walk with me, from room to sorrowful room, making the whole rambling structure of wind and emptiness not quite as scary, as lonely as it was before.

  Jandy Nelson

  Lonely, Grief, Wind

  Jandy Nelson (2010). “The Sky Is Everywhere”, p.59, Penguin

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• The consolations of space are nameless things. It was after the neurosis of winter. It was In the genius of summer that they blew up The statue of Jove among the boomy clouds. It took all day to quieten the sky And then to refill its emptiness again.

  Wallace Stevens

  Summer, Winter, Clouds

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play”, p.429, Vintage

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• Squandering our gifts brings distress to our lives. As it turns out, it's not merely benign or 'too bad' if we don't use the gifts that we've been given; we pay for it with our emotional and physical well-being. When we don't use our talents to cultivate meaningful work, we struggle. We feel disconnected and weighted down by feelings of emptiness, frustration, resentment, shame, disappointment, fear, and even grief.

  Brené Brown

  Motivational, Meaningful, Disappointment

  Brené Brown (2010). “The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are”, p.123, Simon and Schuster

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• We must view young people not as empty bottles to be filled, but as candles to be lit.

  Robert H. Shaffer

  Teacher, Teaching, Views

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• Just as the grammarian makes one study grammar,
  A Buddha teaches according to the tolerance of his students;
  Some he urges to refrain from sins, others to do good,
  Some to rely on dualism, other on non-dualism;
  And to some he teaches the profound,
  The terrifying, the practice of enlightenment,
  Whose essence is emptiness that is compassion

  Akkineni Nagarjuna

  Compassion, Essence, Practice

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• We were meant to grow. When we don't grow, we seek diversions--some harmless (if unproductive), others destructive--to fill the emptiness.

  Jim Clemmer

  Growth, Grows, Diversion

  Jim Clemmer (1999). “Growing the Distance: Timeless Principles for Personal, Career, and Family Success”, p.15, Jim Clemmer

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• For one who is indifferent, life itself is a prison. Any sense of community is external or, even worse, nonexistent. Thus, indifference means solitude. Those who are indifferent do not see others. They feel nothing for others and are unconcerned with what might happen to them. They are surrounded by a great emptiness. Filled by it, in fact. They are devoid of all hope as well as imagination. In other words, devoid of any future.

  Elie Wiesel

  Hope, Mean, Imagination

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• I stood on the balcony dark with mourning... hoping the earth would spread its wings in my uninhabited love.

  Pablo Neruda

  Dark, Winter, Loss

  Pablo Neruda (1986). “Winter garden”, Copper Canyon Pr

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• He knew that he was the stuff of which fanatics and madmen are made and that he had turned his destiny as if with his bare will. He kept himself upright on a very narrow line between madness and emptiness and when the time came for him to lose his balance he intended to lurch toward emptiness and fall on the side of his choice.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Fall, Destiny, Choices

  Flannery O'Connor (1983). “Three by Flannery O'Connor: Wise blood, The violent bear it away, Everything that rises must converge”, Signet Classics

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