Empty Quotes - Page 33

• Some women wait for themselves around the next corner and call the empty spot peace but the opposite of living is only not living and the stars do not care.

  Audre Lorde

  Stars, Opposites, Waiting

  Audre Lorde (2000). “The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde”, p.318, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Never give us what we really want. Cut the dream into pieces and scatter them like ashes. Dole out the empty promises. Package our aspirations and sell them to us, cheaply made enough to fall apart.

  Scott Westerfeld

  Dream, Fall, Cutting

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• If you have never wept bitter tears because a wonderful story has come to an end and you must take your leave of the characters with whom you have shared so many adventures, whom you have loved and admired, for whom you have hoped and feared, and without whose company life seems empty and meaningless. If such things have not been part of your own experience, you probably won't understand what Bastian did next.

  Michael Ende

  Adventure, Character, Tears

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• Or have I passed my time in pouring words like water into empty sieves, rolling a stone up a hill and then down again, trying to prove an argument in the teeth of facts, and looking for causes in the dark, and not finding them?

  William Hazlitt

  Dark, Water, Trying

  William Hazlitt (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)”, p.1100, Delphi Classics

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• Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair. Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species. --speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1962

  John Steinbeck

  Responsibility, Games, Cities

  John Steinbeck (2001). “A Life in Letters”, p.1250, Penguin UK

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• I have always felt that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats the last sanctuary of the terminally inept.

  Neil Gaiman

  Sanctuary, Lasts, Violence

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• Some people see the glass half full. Others see it half empty. I see a glass that's twice as big as it needs to be.

  George Carlin

  Glasses, People, Optimism

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• I say that is wine," Brett held up her glass. "We ought to toast something. 'Here's to royalty.'" "This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. you don't want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. you lose the taste." Brett's glass was empty.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Drinking, Wine, Glasses

  Ernest Hemingway (1926). “The Sun Also Rises”, p.66, Simon and Schuster

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• The light dove, in free flight cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space. Likewise, Plato abandoned the world of the senses because it posed so many hindrances for the understanding, and dared to go beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of pure understanding.

  Immanuel Kant

  Plato, Cutting, Light

  Immanuel Kant, Paul Guyer (1998). “Critique of Pure Reason”, p.129, Cambridge University Press

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• Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.

  P. G. Wodehouse

  Baby, Father, Sadness

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• Yet nothing can to nothing fall, Nor any place be empty quite; Therefore I think my breast hath all Those pieces still, though they be not unite; And now, as broken glasses show A hundred lesser faces, so My rags of heart can like, wish, and adore, But after one such love, can love no more.

  John Donne

  Fall, Heart, Thinking

  John Donne, Theodore Redpath (2009). “The Songs and Sonets of John Donne”, p.166, Harvard University Press

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• You changed the subject." "From what?" "The empty-headed girls who think you're sexy." "You know." "Know what?" "That I only have eyes for you.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Girl, Sexy, Eye

  Khaled Hosseini (2009). “A Thousand Splendid Suns”, p.110, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Fear not, nor be dismayed at the appearance that is darkness, at the disguise that is evil, at the empty cloak that is death, for you have picked these for your challenges. They are stones on which you choose to whet the keen edge of your spirit.

  Richard Bach

  Evil, Challenges, Darkness

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• The future remains uncertain and so it should, for it is the canvas upon which we paint our desires. Thus always the human condition faces a beautifully empty canvas. We possess only this moment in which to dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence which we share and create.

  Frank Herbert

  Future, Journey, Desire

  Frank Herbert (2008). “Children of Dune”, p.311, Penguin

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• Man's right to know, to learn, to inquire, to make bona fide errors, to investigate human emotions must, by all means, be safe, if the word "freedom" should ever be more than an empty political slogan.

  Wilhelm Reich

  Freedom, Mean, Men

  Wilhelm Reich (1960). “Selected Writings: An Introduction to Orgonomy”

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• Let Fortune empty her whole quiver on me, I have a soul that, like an ample shield, Can take in all, and verge enough for more; Fate was not mine, nor am I Fate's: Souls know no conquerors.

  John Dryden

  Fate, Soul, Shields

  John Dryden (1717). “The Dramatick Works of John Dryden, Esq: Don Sebastian, king of Portugal. Amphitryon: or, The two Sosia's. Cleomenes, the Spartan heroe. King Arthur. Love triumphant”, p.37

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• All our days are marked with/ unexpected/ affronts--some/ disastrous, others/ less so/ but the process is/ wearing and/ continuous./ Attrition rules./ Most give/ way/ leaving/ empty spaces/ where people should/ be.

  Charles Bukowski

  Space, People, Giving

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• But the fact of it was that I liked it out there, a ruin devoid of human vanities, clean of human illusions, an empty place reclaimed by the weather where a woman plays an organ to stop the wind's whining and an old man plays ball with a dog named Duke. I could tell you that I came back because I had promises to keep, but maybe it was because nobody asked me to stay.

  Joan Didion

  Dog, Men, Vanity

  Joan Didion (1968). “Slouching towards Bethlehem”

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• I don't want to talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper. I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.

  Graham Chapman

  Mother, Father, Animal

  "Fictional character: Frenchman". "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", 1975.

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• You think of yourself as an "individual person", with a unique and separate mind. You think you are born and you think you die. All your life you feel separate and alone. Sometimes desperately so. You fear death because you fear the loss of individuality. All this is an illusion. You, he, she, those things around you living or not, the stars and galaxies, the empty space in between- these are not distinct, separate objects. All is fundamentally entangled.

  Douglas Preston

  Stars, Loss, Unique

  Douglas Preston (2009). “Blasphemy”, p.307, Pan Macmillan

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• I have the consolation of having added nothing to my private fortune during my public service, and of retiring with hands clean as they are empty.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Hands, Liberty, Clean

  Thomas Jefferson (1829). “Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies: From the Papers of Thomas Jefferson”, p.69

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• As long as a thing is unknown, it belongs to us in a way that well-known things do not. For we have the opportunity to fill the empty, unknown spaces for ourselves, and in them there is room for imagination and for hope.

  Cameron Dokey

  Opportunity, Space, Imagination

  Cameron Dokey (2011). “Golden”, p.91, Simon and Schuster

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• Now they are empty, Ramon replied with a shrug of broad, muscled shoulders on his six-foot-three-inch frame....For the first time, a glint of humor touched Ramon Galverra's finely sculpted mouth and arrogant dark eyes.

  Judith McNaught

  Eye, Dark, Feet

  Judith McNaught (2016). “Tender Triumph”, p.6, Simon and Schuster

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• Claire. Wake up.” She blinked and realized that her head was on Shane’s shoulder, and Michael was nowhere to be seen. Her first thought was, Oh my God, am I drooling? Her second was that she hadn’t realized she was so close to him, snuggled in. Her third was that although Michael’s part of the couch was empty, Shane hadn’t moved away. And he was watching her with warm, friendly eyes. Oh. Oh, wow, that was nice.

  Rachel Caine

  Nice, Eye, Friendly

  Rachel Caine (2006). “Glass Houses: The Morganville Vampires”, p.128, Penguin

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• Hysteria is impossible without an audience. Panicking by yourself is the same as laughing alone in an empty room. You feel really silly.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Silly, Empty Rooms, Hysteria

  Chuck Palahniuk (2011). “Invisible Monsters: A Novel”, p.50, W. W. Norton & Company

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