Empty Rooms Quotes

Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for me. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it. And, Oprah, can you imagine curling up in bed to read a computer? Weeping for Anna Karenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up - some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal. ~ Harper Lee

There are empty rooms, and then there are rooms that feel crowded, corner to corner, with absence. ~ Trenton Lee Stewart

All my life I have arrived early only to find myself standing self-consciously on a corner, outside a door, in an empty room, but the closer I get to death the earlier I arrive, the longer I am content to wait, perhaps to give myself the false sensation that there is too much time rather than not enough. ~ Nicole Krauss

All he knew was all those empty rooms inside him were somehow filled when Mateo was around. ~ Riley Hart

Let's not travel to tick things off lists, or collect half-hearted semi-treasures to be placed in dusty drawers in empty rooms. Rather, we'll travel to find grounds and rooftops and tiny hidden parks, where we'll sit and dismiss the passing time, spun in the city's web, 'til we've surrendered, content to be spent and consumed. I need to feel a place while I'm in it. ~ Victoria Erickson

I like to have a drink or two, but I cut down on that. It was getting a little out of control. Two of the guys in the band don't even drink at all. We just riff off each other man. We're just so, so eye-to-eye with our sense of humour that we can just sit in an empty room and entertain ourselves for hours. ~ Jordan Buckley

In a full heart there is room for everything, and in an empty heart there is room for nothing. ~ Antonio Porchia

I wish there was something more that performers could do other than get out there and sing at benefit performances. I wish I felt that if I had an empty room I'd like to bring in someone and make it a hospice, but I'm not Mother Teresa. I can't do that. ~ Bea Arthur

I was unable to throw myself in the ocean, she writes, the handwriting more erratic as the painkillers seep into every cell, shutting out lights in empty rooms. ~ Nick Flynn

People can come into our lives, then leave without a moment's notice. Each time someone new enters my life, I open a room for them in my heart. When they leave, the room remains. My heart is full of mostly empty rooms. ~ Jose N Harris

A dead dog is more quiet than a house on the steppes, a chair in a empty room. ~ Per Petterson

When the mind's an empty room
The clear days come. ~ Wendell Berry

You don't need great actors to do a 3D picture. All of this condescending stuff that they put out? "Oh, we will always need actors." Bullshit! They are able to take anybody and put some markers on them, and have them walk through an empty room. Then they paint in the background. ~ William Friedkin

Her skin is cold, and clammy; her eyes are the color of sky, on the grey, wet days that leach the world of color and meaning; her voice is little more than a whisper; and while she has no odor, her shadow smells mucky, and pungent, like the skin of a snake. Many years gone, a sect in what is now Afghanistan declared her a goddess, and proclaimed all empty rooms her sacred places. The sect, whose members called themselves The Unforgiven, persisted for two years, until its last adherent finally killed himself, having survived the other members by almost seven months. Despair says little, and is patient. ~ Neil Gaiman

And we who loved the world must learn the language of absence: days foreshortened, empty rooms, the irrevocable distance between the goodbye and the letting go. ~ Joe Bolton

The Mullahs and monks, they must worship you instead of empty rooms. ~ M.F. Moonzajer

What is most mortifying of all is that it is chance - simply a barbarous, lagging chance. That is what is mortifying! Five minutes, only five minutes too late! Had I come five minutes earlier, the moment would have passed away like a cloud, and it would never have entered her head again. And it would have ended by her understanding it all. But now again empty rooms, and me alone. Here the pendulum is ticking; it does not care, it has no pity... There is no one - that's the misery of it! ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

An empty room is a story waiting to happen, and you are the author. ~ Charlotte Moss

They wordlessly excused each other for not loving each other as much as they had planned to. There were empty rooms in the house where they had meant to put their love, and they worked together to fill these rooms with midcentury modern furniture. ("Birthmark"). ~ Miranda July

As all partings foreshadow the great final one, - so, empty rooms, bereft of a familiar presence, mournfully whisper what your room and what mine must one day be. ~ Charles Dickens

But she loved studying and books, the way other people love wine for its power to make you forget. What else did she have? She lived in a deserted, silent house. The sound of her own footsteps in the empty rooms, the silence of the cold streets beyond the closed windows, the rain and the snow, the early darkness, the green lamp beside her that burned throughout the long evenings and which she watched for hours on end until its light began to waver before her weary eyes: this was the setting for her life. ~ Irene Nemirovsky

Now ... in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, ipods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. ~ Harper Lee

The men were making too much noise, laughing, joking, to cover her terrible accusing silence below. She made the empty rooms roar with accusation and shake down a fine dust go guilt that was sucked in their nostrils as they plunged about. ~ Ray Bradbury

Passion. It lies in all of us. Sleeping ... waiting ... and though unwanted, unbidden, it will stir ... open its jaws and howl. It speaks to us ... guides us. Passion rules us all. And we obey. What other choice do we have? Passion is the source of our finest moments. The joy of love ... the clarity of hatred ... the ecstasy of grief. It hurts sometimes more than we can bear. If we could live without passion, maybe we'd know some kind of peace. But we would be hollow. Empty rooms, shuttered and dank. Without passion, we'd be truly dead. ~ Joss Whedon

Emptiness was an index. It recorded the incomprehensible chronicle of the metropolis, the demographic realities, how money worked, the cobbled-together lifestyles and roosting habits. The population remained at a miraculous density, it seemed to him, for the empty rooms brimmed with evidence, in the stragglers they did or did not contain, in the busted barricades, in the expired relatives on the futon beds, arms crossed over their chests in ad hoc rites. The rooms stored anthropological clues re: kinship rituals and taboos. How they treated their dead.

The rich tended to escape. Entire white-glove buildings were devoid, as Omega discovered after they worried the seams of and then shattered the glass doors to the lobby (no choice, despite the No-No Cards). The rich fled during the convulsions of the great evacuation, dragging their distilled possessions in wheeled luggage of European manufacture, leaving their thousand-dollar floor lamps to attract dust to their silver surfaces and recount luxury to later visitors, bowing like weeping willows over imported pile rugs. A larger percentage of the poor tended to stay, shoving layaway bureaus and media consoles up against the doors. There were those who decided to stay, willfully uncomprehending or stupid or incapacitated by the scope of the disaster, and those who could not leave for a hundred other reasons - because they were waiting for their girlfriend or mother or soul mate to make it home first, because their mobil ~ Colson Whitehead

At every step of her rise, she did the work long before she was granted the title. It was like advancing through empty rooms. Nobody opposed her, yet nobody approved of her progress. ~ Ayn Rand

I play in a lot of empty rooms. ~ Colin Hay

The telephone conversation is, by its very nature, reactive, not reflective. Immediacy is its prime virtue ... The letter, written in absorbed solitude, is an act of faith: it assumes the presence of humanity: world and self are generated from within: loneliness is courted, not feared. To write a letter is to be alone with my thoughts in the conjured presence of another person. I keep myself imaginative company. I occupy the empty room. ~ Vivian Gornick

People were like dogs and this was why they took pity on them
dogs alone all the hours of their days and always waiting. Always waiting for company. Dogs who, for all of their devotion, knew only the love of one or two or three people from the beginning of their lives till the end
dogs who, once those one or two had dwindled and vanished from the rooms they lived in, were never to be known again.
You passed like a dog through those empty houses, you passed through empty rooms ... there was always the possibility of companionship but rarely the real event. For most of the hours of your life no one knew or observed you at all. You did what you thought you had to; you went on eating, sleeping, raising your voice at intruders out of a sense of duty. But all the while you were hoping, faithfully but with no evidence, that it turned out, in the end, you were a prince among men. ~ Lydia Millet

My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms ~ T. S. Eliot

I have these thoughts. I think "What if the show doesn't sell well? What if it's a half-empty room?" These are the paranoia thoughts that go through my head on a day-by-day basis. ~ Ladyhawke

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

The only way you can truly get to know an author is through the trail of ink he leaves behind him. The person you think you see is only an empty character: truth is always hidden in fiction. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Yelena." I halted in the doorway, looking back over my shoulder.
"You once said I wasn't ready to believe your reason for killing Reyad. I'll believe you now."
"But I'm not ready to tell you," I said and left the room. ~ Maria V. Snyder

No, cool is fine," he said. "Yes, it's a cool place. It was much cooler seven years ago, and it was actually cool ten years ago, before I even got to the city. You see, what those kids over there" - he pointed at the empty booth - "don't realize is that cool is always past tense. The people who lived it, who set the standards they emulate, there was no cool for them. There was just the present tense: there were bills, friendships, messy fucking, fucking boredom, a million trite decisions on how to pass the time. Self-awareness destroys it. You call something cool and you brand it. Then - poof - it's gone. It's just nostalgia. ~ Stephanie Danler

Self makes an empty display, and the flesh sets up its altars wherever it can find space for them. Favorite ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Widow" is a harsh and hurtful word. It comes from the Sanskrit and it means "empty." I have been empty too long. ~ Lynn Caine

Inside your head you hear
a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you're washing up
in a stranger's bathroom,
standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away
from the dirtiest thing you know.
All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly
darkness,
suddenly only darkness.
In the living room, in the broken yard,
in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airport
bathroom's gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of
unnatural light,
my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away. ~ Richard Siken

He had been alone in the world and empty for so long. But she filled him full, and so he believed everything that had been taken out of him might have been for a purpose. To clear space for something better. ~ Charles Frazier

True love is love that stays constant for ever, whatever it's fortune; whether requited or scored, filled or sent empty away. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Instead of things I'm good at, it might be faster to list the things I can't do. I can't cook or clean the house. My room's a mess, and I'm always losing things. I love music, but I can't sing a note. I'm clumsy and can barely sew a stitch. My sense of direction is the pits, and I can't tell left from right half the time. When I get angry, I tend to break things. Plates and pencils, alarm clocks. Later on I regret it, but at the time I can't help myself. I have no money in the bank. I'm bashful for no reason, and I have hardly any friends to speak of. ~ Haruki Murakami

A distant, eerie howl had risen out of the floor, from far beneath. Silent, absolutely still, she waited, and at last it came again, indefinably closer, but muffled, as if layers of stone-rooms, dungeons, cellars-were between her and it. Not human. She crouched down with her ear to the stone slabs. Somewhere down there, unguessable levels below,something prowled. ~ Catherine Fisher

Each moment is a leap forwards from the brink of an invisible cliff, where time's keen edges are constantly renewed. We lift our foot from the solid ground of all our life lived thus far, and take that perilous step out into the empty air. Not because we can claim any particular courage, but because there is no other way. ~ Han Kang

Inside any important philanthropy meeting, you witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left. ~ Peter Buffett

When you are acting in a film, you have no idea what scene the editor is going to choose. For instance, after you have directed, you feel more comfortable delivering a performance. Because you know the real performance is put together in the editing room. ~ Dolph Lundgren

Being with an insanely jealous person is like being in the room with a dead mammoth. ~ Mike Nichols

Zoya placed her hands on her hips. "Is anyone going to thank me - or Genya, for that matter - for this little miracle?"
"Thank you for nearly killing and then reviving the most valuable hostage in the world so you could use him for your own gain," Kaz said. "Now you need to go. The streets are almost empty, and you need to get to the manufacturing district."
Zoya's beautiful blue eyes slitted. "Show your face in Ravka, Brekker. We'll teach you some manners."
"I'll keep that in mind. When they burn me on the Reaper's Barge, I definitely want to be remembered as polite. ~ Leigh Bardugo

...I had believed she believed it, and I believed that someday I might could, too, when I were grown enough, but now, kneeling on the hard floors of the boardinghouse with Eliza praying for all of us, I can't feel it. I feel propped up -- on Mam's faith, on Eliza's, on all the women in this room. But all I feel is hollowed out and empty, like someone's scraped their fingernails along the inside of my heart. ~ Mackenzi Lee

A Communist must never be opinionated or domineering, thinking that he is good in everything while others are good in nothing; he must never shut himself up in his little room, or brag and boast and lord it over others. ~ Mao Zedong

I wonder if much that ails our society stems from the fact that we have allowed ourselves to be cut off from that love of, and from, the land. It is medicine for broken land and empty hearts. ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

It's great to be in a room full of young people ... The average age of the Senate, I think, is death. ~ Aaron Schock

It's not the best between my family and me. There are so many crimes left unpunished, debts unpaid, white elephants in the middle of the room that no one will even offer a peanut to. We are in the red, emotionally speaking. ~ Margaret Cho

What's with her?" says the painter.
"She's mad because she's a woman," Jon says. This is something I haven't heard for years, not since high school. Once it was a shaming thing to say, and crushing to have it said about you, by a man. It implied oddness, deformity, sexual malfunction.
I go to the living room doorway. "I'm not mad because I'm a woman," I say. "I'm mad because you're an asshole. ~ Margaret Atwood

Even the West has known the architecture of empty space, whose object, for thousands of years, has been less to construct divine houses, than to create sacred places, to seize upon mystery and to immerse man in it-whether by raising the cyclopean pedestal that surrounds him with stars, or by hollowing out the sanctuary that wraps him in haunted night. ~ Andre Malraux

I think he's looking for comfort, but I don't have any to give. ~ Jasmine Warga

Students learn best not by reading the Great Books in a closed room but by opening the doors and windows of experience. ~ Thomas Ehrlich

We were deluged together in the raw, unbalanced Stuff of the universe. Inevitable consequence:
My own little reification.
I was made flesh, and in the process taken from him. I was never supposed to be real. How terrifying to confide your every doubt to an imaginary companion, to bequeath to him every alternative, and then one day turn and see him standing before you. Gonzo must be feeling so hollow inside, with me spun out and separated from him. It must be quiet and empty in there.
And that, of course, is how I survived being shot. Freshly minted, new, I wasn't real enough to die. ~ Nick Harkaway

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty
distance.
Don't leave me for a second, my dearest. ~ Pablo Neruda

Who do I write for? I thought about this again and again over the next few days until the answer crystalized in my consciousness. I write for all readers. But my primary interest is in representing the complex but universal experience of Somalis. I do this because the media representation of the global Somali community is one that is carved out of derivative clichés crammed with pirates, warlords, terrorists, passive women and girls whose entire existence seems to be nothing more than a footnote on the primitive dangers of female genital mutilation. I write because I want to give a long-overdue voice to a community that has experienced a tremendous array of challenges but who constantly face these challenges with the most wicked sense of humour, humility and dignity. My father always used to tell me that in our culture, the done thing when you're facing hardship and your belly is empty is to moisturize your face, comb your hair, press your clothes and step out into the sun with your sense of humanity intact. It's a lesson I've carried with me to this day. ~ Diriye Osman

It is easier to deal with one with an empty bank account than with one, with a broke mind. ~ Jacinta Mpalyenkana

You have to leave room for the other person's ego. ~ Debbie Harry

My friend is one who takes me for what I am. A stranger takes me for something else than what I am ... What men call social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter which lie close together to keep each other warm. It brings men together in crowds and mobs in bar-rooms and elsewhere, but it does not deserve the name of virtue. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Still cries at a good film,
Still kisses with saliva,
No longer empty and frantic like a cat tied to a stick,
That's driven into frozen winter shit
(The ability to laugh at weakness),
Calm,
Fitter,
Healthier and more productive
A pig in a cage on antibiotics. ~ Radiohead

When one person is missing the whole world seems empty. ~ Pat Schweibert

Women have rooms inside of us men cannot fathom.
It's where we store the depths of the hurt we've been dealt.
Where we store the deep love we never want to lose. ~ Rachel Thompson

Because he treats the world as rather empty and ignores the interrelatedness of all things (so stupefying to thought and action), administrative man can make decisions with relatively simple rules of thumb that do not make impossible demands upon his capacity for thought. ~ Herbert Simon

But everyone knows that the Breccia Domain is more than an empty hole in the earth. Who knows what happened to the queens who were thrown down into the dark? Into the heart of the island, where the Goddess's eye is always open. Who knows how she kept those queens or what she turned them into ~ Kendare Blake

Approaching the stove, she would don a voluminous apron, toss some meat on a platter, empty a skillet of its perfectly cooked a point vegetables, sprinkle a handful of chopped parsley over all, and then, like a proficient striptease artist, remove the apron, allowing it to fall to the floor with a shake of her hips. ~ Bert Greene

The mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog. ~ Douglas Adams

When your witnessing is ninety percent, your mind is reduced to ten percent. And when your witnessing is one hundred percent - total, absolute - the screen is empty, the film has disappeared. This is the state of meditation: when there are no thoughts, no feelings - nothing moves, everything stops. There is tremendous serenity. Out of this serenity, silence, peace, a new kind of experience arises, new flowers blossom. ~ Rajneesh

The thorn of death falls from heaven, and its myriad forms leave us no room to move. ~ Kobo Abe

I think sometimes our minds get so full of something that we just have to empty them out. ~ Benjamin Alire Saenz

When I speak now, my experience in art wells up so articulately that I am surprised even while I am talking. I move around a podium as easily as if it were my living room and although I am keyed up I am not anxious. I feel as if I were doing what I should be doing - the feeling I have when intent in my studio. ~ Anne Truitt

I've met nearly every woman in this room, and I can't think of one who would make a better friend. I'd be glad to have you stay."
My relief was inexpressible.
"Do you think," Maxon asked, "That I could still call you 'my dear'?"
"Not a chance." I whispered. ~ Kiera Cass

I could imagine Cnut sitting there and thinking that I must join him soon, and we would raise a horn of ale together. There is no pain in Valhalla, no sadness, no tears, no broken oaths. ~ Bernard Cornwell

In the depths of darkness the sun
never shows, cold and empty with no hope.

On the surface it warms your soul, and all the toxic energy settles below. ~ Tristesse Genevieve