Empty Places Quotes

In the absence of the great majority of guests, all manner of rumors came into the Shalimar Bagh, hooded and cloaked to shield themselves against the elements, and filled the empty places around the dastarkhans: cheap rumors from the gutter as well as fancy rumors claiming aristocratic parentage - an entire social hierarchy of rumor lounged against the bolsters, created by the mystery that enveloped everything like the blizzard. The rumors were veiled, shadowy, unclear, argumentative, often malicious. They seemed like a new species of living thing, and evolved according to the laws laid down by Darwin, mutating randomly and being subjected to the amoral winnowing processes of natural selection. The ~ Salman Rushdie

She was his heart, his other half. She filled all the empty places in his soul that he had desperately tried to paper over with pirate escapades and merry women.
-The Ugly Duchess ~ Eloisa James

nature hates a vacuum and strange things are drawn into empty places; sometimes oddities survive where nothing else can. ~ Craig Johnson

There's eyes behind the mirrors in empty places. ~ Bob Dylan

I know that traditionally, monsters hang around empty places for no apparent reason - and ~ Karl Schroeder

The gift moves towards the empty place. As it turns in its circle it turns towards him who has been empty-handed the longest, and if someone appears elsewhere whose need is greater it leaves its old channel and moves toward him. Our generosity may leave us empty, but our emptiness then pulls gently at the whole until the thing in motion returns to replenish us. Social nature abhors a vacuum. ~ Lewis Hyde

Whatever you do with your life-whatever you end up achieving or not achieving-the great gift you have in you to give to the world is the gift of who you alone are; your way of seeing things, and saying things, and feeling about things, that is like nobody else's. If so much as a single one of you were missing, there would be an empty place at the great feast of life that nobody else in all creation could fill. ~ Frederick Buechner

It is more a mentality than the actual places people live, as Jefferson and Hamilton would argue about - city versus country. For example, someone could have an empty place mentality yet be living in a condo in Boca Raton. ~ Gail Collins

Valuing knowledge above all else results in a lust for power, and that leads men into dark and empty places. ~ Veronica Roth

I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all. ~ Neil Gaiman

When I go looking for glimpses of Him, when I seek to fill the empty places with more of Him who is beauty, my equilibrium recalibrates to find its center in the Judge who became grace to bestow grace and I can rightly read the scale, feel it inside, and know it's true: If you can really see - the weight of Glory always tips the scales for joy. ~ Ann Voskamp

People in big empty places are likely to behave very much as the gods did on Olympus. ~ Edna Ferber

Let's get the heck out of here then. These dark empty places give me the creeps. I feel like zombies are going to spring out at any time," I said, picking up my dropped items.
"If there are zombies then we have much bigger problems," he joked.
-Cora and Noah ~ Andrea Heltsley

There is an empty place within me where my heart once was. ~ George R R Martin

Think back over your day and consider when God spoke. How did you sense it, or why did you fail to sense it at the time? It is often between the lines and in the empty places where we hear God. ~ Lonni Collins Pratt

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars - on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places. ~ Robert Frost

I've been so alone, apart from life, not really knowing why i was so empty. You've filled all those empty places, cara mia. I sleep with you in my arms and have no nightmares. I open my eyes and look forward to each hour, to hear your laughter, to watch you move through my home. Your smile takes my breath away. ~ Christine Feehan

Certainly people in empty places feel they have the right to do what they want to their property and don't necessarily see the effect of their pollution or pesticides on others. But Texans have an appreciation for water problems and are very aware of the droughts. ~ Gail Collins

Of course, Texas is so huge it really is empty places; people can easily drive an hour and a half to work every day, so even if they're actually living in the suburbs, it sure feels as if they're in a remote location. ~ Gail Collins

Natalie Waite, who was seventeen years old but who felt that she had been truly conscious only since she was about fifteen, lived in an odd corner of the world of sound and sight past the daily voices of her father and mother and their incomprehensible actions. For the past two years - since, in fact, she had turned around suddenly one bright morning and seen from the corner of her eye a person called Natalie, existing, charted, inescapably located on a sport of ground, favored with sense and feet and a bright-red sweater, and most obscurely alive - she had lived completely by herself, allowing not even her father access to the farther places of her mind. She visited strange countries, and the voices of their inhabitants were constantly in her ear; when her father spoke he was accompanied by a sound of distant laughter, unheard probably by anyone else except his daughter. ~ Shirley Jackson

Now I know my Redeemer lives. I know my Redeemer lives. Let all creation testify let this life within me cry. I know my Redeemer. He lives to take away my shame. And He lives forever I'll tproclaim That the payment for my sin was the precious life He gave. But now He's alive and there's an empty grave ~ Nicole C. Mullen

...without moving a muscle in his face, slips away; retreats, I think, to that sheltered place where his stories are kept. Perhaps we all have our places. ~ Pete Dexter

I think Jane Austen builds suspense well in a couple of places, but she squanders it, and she gets to the endgame too quickly. So I will be working on those things. ~ Val McDermid

They couldn't talk. They were not good talkers, either of them. And once, long ago now, she had bought a notebook for a course. It lay empty and forgotten on the kitchen table until one afternoon, when she had gone out to the shops and he was worried that she would be killed by a bus or by lightning, he opened the notebook and he wrote lines about how he loved her, the way he loved her, about his fucking heart and crap like that, about his body brimful and his scrambled head. All that. She came back from the shops. He left the notebook where it was, and he didn't mention it. And it wasn't until about a week later that he noticed it again, and he flicked it open, and he saw his lines followed by lines from her. She'd written words that she had never said. He sat down. He read them over and over for a long time. Then he wrote a paragraph for her to find. ~ Keith Ridgway

There was something in his manner of seduction, no show of desire at all; what he offered was a transaction, and again he showed no disappointment when reflexively and without hesitation I said no to him. It was the answer I had always given to such proposals (which are inevitable in the places I frequent), not out of any moral conviction but out of pride, a pride that had weakened in recent years, as I realized I was being shifted by the passage of time from one category of erotic object to another. ~ Garth Greenwell

London is one of my favourite places to come to overseas. ~ Phife Dawg

I certainly was never the pretty girl at school, but I can go to a lot of different places with this face. ~ Mary-Louise Parker

Sometimes the things you've lost can be found again in unexpected places. ~ Lemony Snicket

We were talking of DRAGONS, Tolkien and I
In a Berkshire bar. The big workman
Who had sat silent and sucked his pipe
All the evening, from his empty mug
With gleaming eye glanced towards us:
"I seen 'em myself!" he said fiercely. ~ C.S. Lewis

Some souls are like empty bench in an evening park, no one to take care. The role of compassionate artificial intelligence is to fulfill those souls with love and care. ~ Amit Ray

What can we expect from an empty shell
Where many hearts of pearl once beat to dwell
Waves fail to break hard layer's bond of love
Wailing shore sends memoir to the sky above ~ Munia Khan

We went into a small, windowless office crowded between two others that appeared empty. A middle-aged American woman was seated behind a metal desk. She appeared normal and reasonably attractive until she spoke; then her scarred gums showed that she had once had two or three times the proper number of teeth - forty or fifty, I suppose, in each jaw - and that the dental surgeon who had extracted the supernumerary ones had not always, perhaps, selected those he suffered to remain as wisely as he might. ~ Gene Wolfe

Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes. ~ Toni Morrison

It's really interesting to just look at the career of a musician and a producer that went into many different genres and many different styles and many different places but always breaking the barriers between genres and at some point reinventing himself all along the way but also inventing things at the same time. ~ Thomas Bangalter

Live life to the fullest even when it might feel empty. ~ A.L. Jackson

How Finite Minds Most Want To Be

You are the living marrow.
The rest is hay,
and dead grass does not nourish a human being.

When you are not here,
this desire we feel
has no traveling companion.

When the sun is gone,
the soul's clarity fades.
There is nothing but idiocy and mistakes.
We are half-dead, inanimate, exhausted.

The way finite minds most want to be
is an ocean with a soul swimming in it.
No one can describe that.
These words do not touch you.

Metaphors mentioning the moon
have no effect on the moon.

My soul, you are a master,
a Moses, a Jesus.

Why do I stay blind in your presence?
You are Joseph at the bottom of his well.

Constantly working, but you do not get paid,
because what you do seems trivial, like play.

Now silence.
Unless these words fill with nourishment
from the unseen, they will stay empty,
and why would I serve my friends
bowls with no food in them? ~ Rumi

I think I knew even then it would be my maps that would take me across the world, to places and people unknown and into cultures otherwise closed to me. In mapping them I would come to know them a little and at times my very eagerness pained me. ~ Julie Haydon

It takes a little time to create a gap between the witness and the mind. Once the gap is there, you are in for a great surprise, that you are not the mind, that you are the witness, a watcher. And this process of watching is the very alchemy of real religion. Because as you become more and more deeply rooted in witnessing, thoughts start disappearing. You are, but the mind is utterly empty ... ~ Rajneesh

Sometimes I dream about it, I'm walking down this long empty hall. My voice echoes all around, but no one answers, so I walk faster, opening doors, shouting names. I don't even know who I'm looking for. Most nights it's my father, but sometimes it's Robb instead, or my little sister Arya, or my uncle. Even the ravens are gone from the rookery, and the stables are full of bones. That always scares me. I start to run then, throwing open doors, climbing the tower three steps at a time, screaming for someone, for anyone. And then I find myself in front of the door to the crypts. It's black inside, and I can see the steps spiraling down. Somehow I know I have to go down there, but I don't want to. I'm afraid of what might be waiting for me. The old Kings of Winter are down there, sitting on their thrones with stone wolves at their feet and iron swords across their laps, but it's not them I'm afraid of. I scream that I'm not a Stark, that this isn't my place, but it's no good, I have to go anyway, so I start down, feeling the walls as I descend, with no torch to light the way. It gets darker and darker, until I want to scream" -Jon Snow ~ George R.R. Martin

Every pain is repeated in other places and other lives, every joy is repeated in other places and other lives. ~ Doutor Luis Alexandre Ribeiro Branco

He did not want to die like a sick man. He did not want his sickness to be what it is so often, an attenuation, a transition to death. What he really wanted was the encounter between his life - a life filled with blood and health - and death. He stood, dragged a chair over to the window and sat down in it, huddling in his blankets. Through the thin curtains, in the places where the material did not fall in folds, he saw the stars. He breathed heavily for a long time, and gripped the arms of his chair to control his trembling hands. He would reconquer his lucidity if he could. "It could be done, " he was thinking. And he was thinking, too, that the gas was still on in the kitchen. "It could be done," he thought again. Lucidity too was a long patience. Everything could be won, earned, acquired. He struck his fist on the arm of the chair. A man is not born strong, weak, or decisive. He becomes strong, he becomes lucid. Fate is not in man but around him. Then he realized he was crying. A strange weakness, a kind of cowardice born of his sickness gave way to tears, to childishness. ~ Albert Camus

The poet ... is the man of metaphor: while the philosopher is interested only in the truth of meaning, beyond even signs and names, and the sophist manipulates empty signs ... the poet plays on the multiplicity of signifieds. ~ Jacques Derrida

Those darling byegone times, Mr Carker,' said Cleopatra, 'with their delicious fortresses, and their dear old dungeons, and their delightful places of torture, and their romantic vengeances, and their picturesque assaults and sieges, and everything that makes life truly charming! How dreadfully we have degenerated! ~ Charles Dickens

I'M NOT A PESSIMIST!
I just see the glass half empty even when it's completely full.
...WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE! ~ Clara DeLemos

Instead of leading to the high places of happiness, from which the world would seem to lie below one, so that one could look down with a sense of exaltation and advantage, and judge and choose and pity, it led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and depression, where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was heard as from above, and served to deepen the feeling of failure. ~ Henry James

And empty words are evil. ~ Homer

Depending on the places we passed, the night around us shaded from ink black to red to purple to a washed-out yellow that hung like gauze in front of the dark, like you could see the dark sitting under the light, and then it would be back to ink black, and the air would change smells from sea salt to pine pulp to ammonia and burning oil. Trees and marshland crowded us and we passed over the Atchafalaya Basin, a long bridge suspended over a liquid murk, and I thought about the dense congestion of vines and forest when I was a kid, how the green and leafy things had seemed so full of shadows, and how it had felt like half the world was hidden in those shadows. ~ Nic Pizzolatto

What if becoming who and what we truly are happens not through striving and trying but by recognizing and receiving the people and places and practices that offer us the warmth of encouragement we need to unfold? ~ Oriah Dreamer

I usually write away from home, in coffee shops, on trains, on planes, in friends' houses. I like places where there's stuff going on that you can lift your eyes, see something interesting, overhear a conversation. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Now, through an act as simple as walking across a stage and collecting an empty plastic folder representing a degree, our stock had plummeted to nothing, the wretched leavings of some cosmic Ponzi scheme. A lifetime's worth of planning and training and delusion gone with the wind. Some of us were moving home to live free of charge in our parents' guest rooms, or if we were thin enough, heading west to try our luck in L.A.; others, to our collective horror, were being forced to work at actual jobs. ~ Rachel Shukert

If you feel empty, you are right on the verge of God's greatest blessing. Just seek His face. Should you be desperate and hurting and experiencing loss, remember that the Lord lifts up the downcast and casts down the proud. He will in His own good time turn your mourning into joy. ~ Timothy E. Crosby

Because I'm selfish, Layla. I'll ruin you, set you on fire, and won't even look back. I'll take and take until you're empty and hollow. ~ Saffron A. Kent

Books light the fire - whether it's a book that's already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in. ~ Meg Wolitzer