Vacant Quotes - Page 5

• As a kid, I played my share of football in the street or in a vacant lot. When we were playing in the street, it was more touch football, so we didn't hit each other into cars.

  Barry Sanders

  Football, Kids, Car

  "Barry Sanders: 'Mr. 99'". Interview with Jon Robinson, www.espn.com. July 31, 2009.

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• If in a city we had six vacant lots available to the youngsters of a certain neighborhood for playing ball, it might be "development" to build houses on the first, and the second, and the third, and the fourth, and even the fifth, but when we build houses on the last one, we forget what houses are for.

  Aldo Leopold

  Nature, Cities, House

  Aldo Leopold, David Earl Brown, Neil B. Carmony (1995). “Aldo Leopold's Southwest”, p.159, UNM Press

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• I see the children with their boredom and their vacant stares.

  Billy Joel

  Children, Reality, Boredom

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• No man is much regarded by the rest of the world. He that considers how little he dwells upon the condition of others, will learn how little the attention of others is attracted by himself. While we see multitudes passing before us, of whom perhaps not one appears to deserve our notice or excites our sympathy, we should remember, that we likewise are lost in the same throng, that the eye which happens to glance upon us is turned in a moment on him that follows us, and that the utmost which we can reasonably hope or fear is to fill a vacant hour with prattle, and be forgotten.

  Samuel Johnson

  Eye, Men, Littles

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• Your honesty is not to be based either on religion or policy. Both your religion and policy must be based on it. Your honesty must be based, as the sun is, in vacant heaven; poised, as the lights in the firmament, which have rule over the day and over the night.

  John Ruskin

  Honesty, Night, Light

  'Time and Tide' (1867) letter 8

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• His whole being radiates a pure, wild sweetness, flitting through night woods with little melodious cries, on some cryptic errand. There is also an aura of doom and sadness about this trusting little creature. He has been abandoned many times over the centuries, left to die in cold city alleys, in hot noon vacant lots, pottery shards, nettles, crumbled mud walls. Many times he has cried for help in vain.

  William S. Burroughs

  Wall, Sadness, Cat

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• Nature never deserts the wise and pure; no plot so narrow, be but nature there; no waste so vacant, but may well employ each faculty of sense, and keep the heart awake to love and beauty.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Wise, Nature, Heart

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1836). “Letters, Conversations and Recollections”, p.35

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• I walked in a desert.
  And I cried,
  ‘Ah, God, take me from this place!’
  A voice said, ‘It is no desert.’
  I cried, ‘Well, But -
  The sand, the heat, the vacant horizon.’
  A voice said, ‘It is no desert.’

  Stephen Crane

  Voice, Desert, Horizon

  Stephen Crane (1984). “Prose and Poetry”, p.1314, Library of America

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• In AI, Spielberg is bleaching the dirt out of the human mind and leaving behind only the vacant gaze of machine 'love'. Coca Cola ads do much the same thing - and they don't take two hours.

  Bryan Appleyard

  Two, Leaving, Mind

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• Modern science kills God and takes his place on the vacant throne. Science is the sole legitimate arbiter of all relavent truth.

  Vaclav Havel

  Thrones, Modern, Sole

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• There is nothing more distressing ... than the hard, scoffing spirit which treats the allegation of dishonesty in a public man as a cause for laughter. Such laughter is worse than the crackling of thorns under a pot, for it denotes not merely the vacant mind, but the heart in which high emotions have been choked before they could grow to fruition.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Laughter, Heart, Men

  The Man with the Muck-rake, delivered 14 April 1906

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• The past, the future, majesty, love - if they are vacant of you, you are vacant of them.

  Walt Whitman

  Past, Majesty, Ifs

  Walt Whitman “Annotated LEAVES OF GRASS with English Grammar Exercises: by Walt Whitman (Author), Robert Powell (Editor)”, Powell Publications, LLC

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• Watch the growth of middle level management. Don't automatically fill vacant jobs. Leave some positions unfilled for 6-8 months to see what happens. You will find you won't need to fill some of them.

  Donald Rumsfeld

  Jobs, Growth, Watches

  Donald Rumsfeld (2001). “Public Statements of Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, 2001”

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• I'm very tired of staring out into your vacant faces looking back at me. Wanting to fill your empty lives with humor you couldn't possibly think of yourself... Good evening!

  Bill Hicks

  Tired, Thinking, Empty Life

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• Usually when I draw, I try to be in a contemplative mood. I try to keep my mind as empty, vacant and tranquil as possible. The outer mind is like the surface of the sea. On the surface, the sea is full of waves and surges; it is all restlessness. But when we dive deep below, the same sea is all peace, calmness and quiet, and there we find the source of creativity.

  Sri Chinmoy

  Creativity, Sea, Mind

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• These words "accessible" and "emotionally available" get thrown at us from agents and editors and publishers - or the reverse - if it's not all goo-ey and sentimental we're told it's "cold" or "uncaring" or "emotionally vacant." In other words, responses to women's writing in particular continue to be "gendered."

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Writing, Editors, Agents

  Source: therumpus.net

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• There are very few films that I've ever seen in my life that would be as silent or vacant as something like Jeremiah Johnson, and that to me was unbelievably captivating. You can see the same about [The Outlaw] Josey Wales: there's very little dialogue, and yet it contains such a deep, rich story. I've always thought of the western as American storytelling at its best.

  Kiefer Sutherland

  Littles, Would Be, Stories

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• When children ask you questions about gray hairs, and wrinkles in the face, and sighs that have no words, and smiles too bright to be carved upon the radiant face by the hands of hypocrisy--when they ask you about kneeling at the altar, speaking into the vacant air, and uttering words to an unseen and in an invisible Presence--when they interrogate you about your great psalms, and hymns, and anthem-bursts of thankfulness, what is your reply to these? Do not be ashamed of the history. Keep steadily along the line of fact. Say what happened to you, and magnify God in the hearing of the inquirer.

  Joseph Parker

  Children, Hymns, Wrinkles

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• At heart, he could not abide sense in women: he liked to see them as silly, as light-headed, as vain, as open to ridicule as possible; because they were then in reality what he held them to be, and wished them to be,--inferior: toys to play with, to amuse a vacant hour and to be thrown away.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Silly, Heart, Reality

  Charlotte Bronte (2010). “Shirley and The Professor”, p.119, Everyman's Library

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• Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.

  John Updike

  Exercise, Thinking, Museums

  "A Few Words In Defense Of The Amateur Reader" by John Updike, www.nytimes.com. February 19, 1984.

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• In that sweet mood when pleasure loves to pay
  Tribute to ease; and, of its joy secure,
  The heart luxuriates with indifferent things,
  Wasting its kindliness on stocks and stones,
  And on the vacant air.

  William Wordsworth

  Sweet, Nature, Heart

  William Wordsworth (1847). “The Poems of William Wordsworth”, p.143

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• As an actor, if you're just sitting and staring and you don't know who you are in your own mind, it's vacant. And sometimes the camera is an X-ray machine, it can pick it up.

  Albert Brooks

  Mind, Rays, Cameras

  "Albert Brooks Says He Knows His ‘Drive’ Character’s Entire Backstory" by Christopher Bell, www.indiewire.com. September 16, 2011.

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• In a city you thought of all life as human life. You had to live in the heart of the woods to realize that humanity was a slight ripple on the surface of a flood of life that seeped into every vacant crack, flowed into every biological vacuum the moment it occurred.

  Helen McCloy

  Heart, Cities, Humanity

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• The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways. Six o'clock. The burnt-out ends of smoky days. And now a gusty shower wraps The grimy scraps Of withered leaves about your feet And newspapers from vacant lots; The showers beat On broken blinds and chimney-pots, And at the corner of the street A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps. And then the lighting of the lamps.

  T. S. Eliot

  Lonely, Horse, Winter

  Prufrock (1917) "Preludes"

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• Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. The town I grew up in had many vacant lots; when I go back now, the vacant lots are gone. They were a luxury, just as tigers and rhinoceri, in the crowded world that is making, are luxuries. Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.

  John Updike

  Art, Exercise, Men

  "A Few Words In Defense Of The Amateur Reader" by John Updike, www.nytimes.com. February 19, 1984.

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