Hollowness Quotes

• No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.

  Alan Watts

  Inspirational, Fear, Heart

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.79, Souvenir Press

  89 Copy quote

  Show source

• The idea of democracy has been stripped of it moral imperatives and come to denote hollowness and hypocrisy.

  Paul Wellstone

  Democracies Have, Ideas, Hypocrisy

  29 Copy quote

• In fact, I am aware of the fake entities in my life.
  I know that I can clear them if I wanted to in a moment.
  But all this hollowness Needs my Sincerity.

  Rumi

  Fake, Needs, Facts

  10 Copy quote

• Something is missing: that's as close as I can come to naming the sensation, an awareness of missed or thwarted connections, or of a great hollowness left where something lovely and solid used to be. ...There is something fundamentally insatiable about being human, as though we come into the world with a kind of built-in tension between the experience of being hungry, which is a condition of striving and yearning, and the experience of being fed, which may offer temporary satisfaction but always gives way to new strivings, new yearnings.

  Caroline Knapp

  Giving, Missing, Lovely

  11 Copy quote

• There's a hollowness to civilized life. It doesn't appeal to people, and some people react with extreme violence.

  John Zerzan

  People, Violence, Appeals

  "'We don't know what's going to happen. If we say we're doomed, we are, full stop.' A Q&A with John Zerzan and Zander Sherman". logger.believermag.com. December 4, 2015.

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• Unlawful pleasure, trenching on another's rights, is delusive and envenomed pleasure—its hollowness disappoints at the time, its poison cruelly tortures afterwards, its effects deprave forever.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Rights, Forever, Poison

  1857 The Professor, ch.20.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Some of our loves and attachments are elemental and beyond our choosing, and for that very reason they come spiced with pain and regret and need and hollowness and a feeling as close to anger as I will ever be able to manage.

  Colm Toibin

  Pain, Regret, Attachment

  "The Empty Family: Stories". Book by Colm Toibin, October 1, 2010.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Those who cannot work with their hearts achieve but a hollow, half-hearted success that breeds bitterness all around.

  Abdul Kalam

  Congratulations, Heart, Half

  Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam, Arun Tiwari (1999). “Wings of Fire: An Autobiography”, p.45, Universities Press

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• The hollowness was in his arms and the world was snowing.

  William Goldman

  Inspirational, Snow, World

  William Goldman (2013). “The Princess Bride”, p.111, A&C Black

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Moralists love to discourse on the hollowness of success; about the hollowness of failure they are silent.

  Mason Cooley

  Success, Silent, Discourse

  7 Copy quote

• I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Inspirational, Beautiful, Girl

  The Great Gatsby ch. 1 (1925)

  75 Copy quote

  Show source

• All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken.

  Thomas Wolfe

  Love, Wall, Home

  Thomas Wolfe (1999). “Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth”, p.344, Simon and Schuster

  90 Copy quote

  Show source

• What do you think love is - a thing to startle from the heart like a bird at every shout or blow? You can fly from me, high as you choose into your darkness, but you will see me always beneath you, no matter how far away, with my face turned to you. My heart is in your heart. I gave it to you with my name that night and you are its guardian, to treasure it, or let it whither and die. I do not understand you. I am angry with you. I am hurt and helpless, but nothing will fill the ache of the hollowness in me where your name would echo if I lost you.

  Patricia A. McKillip

  Hurt, Heart, Love Is

  "The Forgotten Beasts of Eld". Book by Patricia A. McKillip, 1974.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think you can tell, when you meet someone, whether they read novels or not. There is some little hollowness if they don't.

  Philip Hensher

  Thinking, Novel, Ifs

  "Philip Hensher: a life in writing" by Nicholas Wroe, www.theguardian.com. March 30, 2012.

  44 Copy quote

  Show source

• I hate this world, this dream, this horrible nightmare, with its churches and chicaneries, its books and blackguardisms, its fair faces and false hearts, its howling righteousness on the surface and utter hollowness beneath and, above all, its sanctified shopkeeping!

  Swami Vivekananda

  Dream, Hate, Book

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.2027, Manonmani Publishers

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Fiction allows us to see the world from the point of view of someone else and there has been quite a lot of neurological research that shows reading novels is actually good for you. It embeds you in society and makes you think about other people. People are certainly better at all sorts of things if they can hold a novel in their heads. It is quite a skill, but if you can't do it then you're missing out on something in life. I think you can tell, when you meet someone, whether they read novels or not. There is some little hollowness if they don't.

  Philip Hensher

  Reading, Thinking, Views

  "Philip Hensher: a life in writing" by Nicholas Wroe, www.theguardian.com. March 30, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Where we find echoes, we generally find emptiness and hollowness; it is the contrary with the echoes of the heart.

  John Frederick Boyes

  Heart, Echoes, Emptiness

  John Frederick Boyes (1859). “Life and Books: Or, Records of Thought and Reading”, p.7

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• The vested interests-if we explain the situation by their influence-can only get the public to act as they wish by manipulating public opinion, by playing either upon the public's indifference, confusions, prejudices, pugnacities or fears. And the only way in which the power of the interests can be undermined and their maneuvers defeated is by bringing home to the public the danger of its indifference, the absurdity of its prejudices, or the hollowness of its fears; by showing that it is indifferent to danger where real danger exists; frightened by dangers which are nonexistent.

  Norman Angell

  Real, Hate, Home

  8 Copy quote

• Sometimes--sometimes it just hits me, you know? And, it's not getting any easier." I choke, my eyes flooding all over again. "I'm not sure that it will. I think you just get used to the feeling, the hollowness, the loss, and somehow learn to live around it

  Alyson Noel

  Eye, Loss, Thinking

  Alyson Noel (2013). “The Immortals Bundle 1-3: The Immortals: Evermore, The Immortals: Blue Moon and The Immortals: Shadowland”, p.129, Pan Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• How resilient was the body, to return to its prior form so quickly! Yet the mind was formed of a less pliable substance. The emptiness in her thoughts would not be so easily filled. Instead there was a hollowness among them-a place she had reserved for future joys which now would never arrive.

  Galen Beckett

  Joy, Mind, Return

  Galen Beckett (2012). “The Master of Heathcrest Hall”, p.35, Spectra

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• What i literally cannot describe is the hollowness in my lungs when i am out of her presence. It is as if i were dying from the want of her.

  Jed Rubenfeld

  Dying, Want, Lungs

  Jed Rubenfeld (2007). “The Interpretation of Murder: A Novel”, p.235, Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I see that children fill the existential hollowness many people feel; that when we have children, we know they will need us, and maybe love us, but we don't have a clue how hard it is going to be.

  Anne Lamott

  Children, People, Needs

  7 Copy quote

• Then I felt something inside me break and music began to pour out into the quiet. My fingers danced; intricate and quick they spun something gossamer and tremulous into the circle of light our fire had made. The music moved like a spiderweb stirred by a gentle breath, it changed like a leaf twisting as it falls to the ground, and it felt like three years Waterside in Tarbean, with a hollowness inside you and hands that ached from the bitter cold.

  Patrick Rothfuss

  Fall, Fire, Light

  "The Name of the Wind". Book by Patrick Rothfuss, 2007.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!

  Virginia Woolf

  Heart, Body, Want

  Virginia Woolf (2016). “To the Lighthouse”, p.175, Virginia Woolf

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  5 Copy quote