Nothing To See Quotes

Alone, Empty, Fraud, Shame, Fear,
Close your eyes.There is nothing to see out here. ~ Penelope Douglas

answered the phone; it was, in fact, the Times - the Los Angeles one. Jackie took the call, and by the time I could get unhooked from my homicidal seat belt and turned around to look, there was nothing to see except the usual mad, gleaming pack of angry, overpowered vehicles. I scanned in all directions a couple of times, but I saw no cycles, and I heard no more popping backfire sounds. So I shrugged it off before we were even halfway to work, and thought no more about motorcycles. ~ Jeff Lindsay

People moved slowly then. They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything. A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County. ~ Harper Lee

There's no radar image for a water crisis. No storm surges, no debris fields - the Tap-Out is as silent as cancer. There's nothing to see, and so the news is treating it like a sidebar. ~ Jarrod Shusterman

There was a Japanese TV set in front of us. There were Japanese TV sets all over the prison. They were like portholes on an ocean liner. The passengers were in a state of suspended animation until the big ship got where it was going. But anytime they wanted, the passengers could look through a porthole and see the real world out there.
Life was like an ocean liner to a lot of people who weren't in prison, too, of course. And their TV sets were portholes through which they could look while doing nothing, to see all the World was doing with no help from them.
Look at it go! ~ Kurt Vonnegut

You look at me like you see something." He drew his thumbs over her cheekbones and felt the swell as she smiled.

"I do."

"No. Nothing to see."

She blinked and her eyes cleared and opened fully. "That's not true, Show. I see kindness. Strength. And sorrow." One hand slid from his neck, and she put her fingers over his mouth and through his beard. "When I look at you, I can feel you. I don't know why. ~ Susan Fanetti

He thought other resourceful people would have come, over the years, to look at it, and that the house would wear its own mild frown of self-regard, a certain half-friendly awareness of being admired. It would live up to its fame. But really there was nothing to see. The upstairs windows seemed to ponder blankly on the reflections of clouds. ~ Alan Hollinghurst

Why look to far ahead, when there was nothing to see but dark clouds? ~ Catherine Jinks

There was nothing to see, nothing to distract me from succumbing to my fears, and the longer I kept my eyes shut, the more terribly I saw my fears wanted me to see. ~ Paul Auster

Marseilles isn't a city for tourists. There's nothing to see. Its beauty can't be photographed. It can only be shared. It's a place where you have to take sides, be passionately for or against. Only then can you see what there is to see. And you realize, too late, that you're in the middle of a tragedy. An ancient tragedy in which the hero is death. In Marseilles, even to lose you have to know how to fight. ~ Jean-Claude Izzo

here is nothing to see, however, and not a soul to meet. You might walk for twenty miles along this track without being able to fix a point in your mind, unless you are a bushman. This is because of the everlasting, maddening sameness of the stunted trees - that monotony which makes a man long to break away and travel as far as trains can go, and sail as far as ship can sail - and farther. ~ Henry Lawson

Nothing-to-see is what most of the universe consists of. ~ Terry Pratchett

In my hometown, the sky seemed endless ... but there was nothing to see. ~ Ryohgo Narita

It's a side effect of the process. You know how they say the eyes are the windows to the soul?" he asked, and I swallowed thickly before nodding. I didn't like where this was headed. "Evidently they mean that literally. Once the soul is gone, there's nothing to see through the windows."
Nash whistled softly. "That has to be the weirdest thing I've ever seen." And that meant a lot coming from a bean sidhe.
"You want me to put the contact back in, don't you?" Addison cocked her head and gave him a small, eerie smile.
"That's be great, thanks." Nash nodded decisively.
-Tod, Nash and Addison talking about her blank white eyes ~ Rachel Vincent

It was then Jessica realized he wasn't using his left hand at all, and that he held the arm oddly, as though something were wrong with it. There shouldn't be except for a minor bullet wound. She'd aimed carefully, and she was an excellent markswoman. Not to mention he was a very large target.
He looked her way then, and caught her staring. Admiring your handiwork, are you? I daresay you'd like a better look. Regrettably, there's nothing to see. There's nothing wrong with it, according to the quacks. Except that it doesn't work. Still, I count myself fortunate, Miss Trent, that you didn't aim a ways lower. I'm merely disarmed, not dismanned. But I have no doubt that Herriard here will see to the emasculation. ~ Loretta Chase

I'm tired of being what everyone else has made me," I said. "I want to be myself." "Don't be a child." I looked up, startled and angry, though of course there was nothing to see. "What?" "You are what your creators and experiences have made you, like every other being in this universe. Accept that and be done; I'm tired of your whining. ~ N.K. Jemisin

I do not believe that my generation, my cousins who have been educated in the American way, all of whom are MDs or PhDs, have any comparable learning ... I am not saying anything so trite as that life is fuller when people have myths to live by. I mean rather that a life based on the Book is closer to the truth, that it provides the material for deeper research in and access to the real nature of things. Without the great revelations, epics, and philosophies as part of our natural vision, there is nothing to see out there, and eventually little left inside. The Bible is not the only means to furnish a mind, but without a book of similar gravity, read with the gravity of the potential believer, it will remain unfurnished. ~ Allan Bloom

I'm trying to work only with established, respected directors. I took a lot of bad scripts and worked for a lot of lazy directors, and it was discouraging to go to the screenings and see that the director had added nothing, the editor had added nothing, there was nothing to see. ~ Michael Caine

We would be blind, Auk. As blind as I. Because I have never had eyes of my own, I could not look out through yours. But I shall go with you, and guide you, and use your body to heal you, if I can. Look upon me, Auk." "There's nothing to see," Auk protested. But there was: a stammering light so filled with hope and pleasure and wonder that Auk would willingly have seen nothing else, if only he could have watched it forever. ~ Gene Wolfe

Then I saw her smile so close to my eye that there was nothing to see but the smile and the thought came into my head that I'd never been inside a smile before. Who'd have thought being inside a smile would be so ancient and so modern both at once ~ Ali Smith

There was nothing to see but the endless procession of tail-lights and headlights – rubies and diamonds was how Gran had described them to me as a child. ~ Melanie Casey

I know what it's like to have a young child at the weekend and feel like there is nothing to see in the movie theatre. Family is so important. ~ Teri Hatcher

It is not the multitude of hard duties, it is not the constraint and contention that advance us in our Christian course. On the contrary, it is the yielding of our wills without restriction and without choice to tread cheerfully every day in the path in which Providence leads us. It is to seek nothing, to be discouraged by nothing, to see our duty in the present moment, and to trust all else without reserve to the will and power of God. ~ Francois Fenelon

A funny thing happens when more than one knitter gathers in a public place. A solo knitter, presuming she is a woman, quickly fades into the backdrop like a potted palm or a quietly nursing mother. ... A single knitter is shorthand for "nothing to see here, move on."

But when knitters gather, we become incongruously conspicuous. We are a species that other people aren't used to seeing in flocks, like a cluster of Corgis, a dozen Elvis impersonators waiting for the elevator. ~ Clara Parkes

Black is my favorite color. It's limitless. It's indefinable. It keeps you guessing. When there's nothing to see, you're forced to imagine. It makes every shape, every person more mysterious because you can't see all the details. ~ Katie Kacvinsky

From some infinite distance, ten thousand twists of light are suddenly projected into your eyes. You watch as they shimmer and tighten together like the hooks of metal in a tangle of barbed wire.
More and more of them appear, filling in the gaps one by one, and soon you are conscious of nothing else.
What would the sky be like if there was nothing to see but stars?
You know that you will not experience anything so beautiful again. ~ Kevin Brockmeier

Have you ever watched a storm approaching on a hot summer's day? It's especially spectacular in the mountains. At first there's nothing to see, but you feel a sort of weariness that tells you something is in the air. Then you hear thunder - just a rumble here and there- you can't quite tell where it is coming from. All of a sudden, the mountains seem strangely near. There isn't a breath of wind, yet dense clouds pile up in the sky. And now the mountains have almost vanished behind a wall of haze. Clouds rush in from all sides, but still there's no wind. There's more thunder now, and everything around looks eir and menacing. You wait and wait. And then, suddenly, it erupts. At first it is almost a release. The storm descends into the valley. There's thunder and lightning everywhere. The rain clatters down in huge drops. The storm is trapped in the narrow cleft of the valley and thunderclaps echo and reverberate off the steep mountain sides. The wind buffets you from every angle. And when the storm finally moves away, leaving in its place a clear, still, starlit night, you can hardly remember where those thunderclouds were, let alone which thunderclap belonged to which flash of lightning. ~ E.H. Gombrich

When there's nothing to see, when there are no thoughts, life comes instead. ~ John Ajvide Lindqvist

A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County. But it was a time of vague optimism for some of the people: Maycomb County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself. We ~ Harper Lee

In Paris the swaying lanterns are lit in the streets; lights shine through water, fuzzy, diffuse. Saint-Just sits by an insufficient fire, in a poor light. He is a Spartan after all, and Spartans don't need home comforts. He has begun his report, his list of accusations; if Robespierre saw it now, he would tear it up, but in a few days' time it will be the very thing he needs. Sometimes he stops, half-glances over his shoulder. He feels someone has come into the room behind him; but when he allows himself to look, there is nothing to see. It is my destiny, he feels, forming in the shadows of the room. It is the guardian angel I had, long ago when I was a child. It is Camille Desmoulins, looking over my shoulder, laughing at my grammar. He pauses for a moment. He thinks, there are no living ghosts. He takes hold of himself. Bends his head over his task. His pen scratches. His strange letterforms incise the paper. His handwriting is minute. He gets a lot of words to the page. ~ Hilary Mantel

This must be Aleppo. Nothing to see, of course. Just a long, poor-lighted platform with loud furious altercations in Arabic going on somewhere. Two men below her window were talking French. ~ Agatha Christie

My big fear is that if I act the way I am, people will notice that there is nothing to see. So I have to be active all the time, covering up. ~ Slavoj Zizek

Winter tightened its grip on Alaska. The vastness of the landscape dwindled down to the confines of their cabin. The sun rose at quarter past ten in the morning and set only fifteen minutes after the end of the school day. Less than six hours of light a day. Snow fell endlessly, blanketed everything. It piled up in drifts and spun its lace across windowpanes, leaving them nothing to see except themselves. In the few daylight hours, the sky stretched gray overhead; some days there was merely the memory of light rather than any real glow. Wind scoured the landscape, cried out as if in pain. The fireweed froze, turned into intricate ice sculptures that stuck up from the snow. In the freezing cold, everything stuck -- car doors froze, windows cracked, engines refused to start. The ham radio filled with warnings of bad weather and listed the deaths that were as common in Alaska in the winter as frozen eyelashes. People died for the smallest mistake -- car keys dropped in a river, a gas tank gone dry, a snow machine breaking down, a turn taken too fast. Leni couldn't go anywhere or do anything without a warning. Already the winter seemed to have gone on forever. Shore ice seized the coastline, glazed the shells and stones until the beach looked like a silver-sequined collar. Wind roared across the homestead, as it had all winter, transforming the white landscape with every breath. Trees cowered in the face of it, animals built dens and burrowed in holes and went into hiding. Not so ~ Kristin Hannah

Observation: there was absolutely nothing to see on Venus. Conclusion: it must be covered with life. ~ Carl Sagan

We should not forget that before being inscribed in Western consciousness as the principle of quantification, harmony, and classical non-existence, Greek measurement was an immense social and polymorphous practice of assessment, quantification, establishing equivalences, and the search for appropriate proportions and distributions.

We can see how introducing measure is linked to a whole problem of peasant indebtedness, the transfer of agricultural properties, the settlement of debts, equivalence between foodstuff or manufactured objects, urbanization, and the establishment of a State form.

The institution of money appears at the heart of this practice of measurement. ~ Michel Foucault

The graveyard was at the top of the hill. It looked over all of the town. The town was hills - hills that issued down in trickles and then creeks and then rivers of cobblestone into the town, to flood the town with rough and beautiful stone that had been polished into smooth flatness over the centuries. It was a pointed irony that the very best view of the town could be had from the cemetery hill, where high, thick walls surrounded a collection of tombstones like wedding cakes, frosted with white angels and iced with ribbons and scrolls, one against another, toppling, shining cold. It was like a cake confectioner's yard. Some tombs were big as beds. From here, on freezing evenings, you could look down at the candle-lit valley, hear dogs bark, sharp as tuning forks banged on a flat stone, see all the funeral processions coming up the hill in the dark, coffins balanced on shoulders.
("The Candy Skull") ~ Ray Bradbury

Literally minutes before the Senate cast its vote, the administration sought to add the words 'in the United States and' after 'appropriate force' in the agreed-upon text. This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just overseas-where we all understood he wanted authority to act-but right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens. I could see no justification for Congress to accede to this extraordinary request for additional authority. I refused. ~ Tom Daschle

I'm a big fan of history - applying the lessons as well as the joys and sadness. If we pay attention, we would see how we affect each other. In terms of time, we are not that far from one another. If we were to look back a century, it would seem like a long time; but, if we look at it by decades then it's only 10 years, and by generations it's only five. ~ Nikki Giovanni

When you grow older you miss that eagerness; life may be happy, you may have health and wealth and love and success, but the odds are that you never look forward as you once did to a single golden day. You never count the hours to it, you never see some moment ahead beckoning like a goddess across a fourth dimension. ~ James Hilton

Courtney, I had this all planned out, and I wanted to make it so special for you, but something just came over me, and I ... well, shit ... I couldn't wait another minute. I love you, Courtney. I want to love you for the rest of my life. I want to wake up to you every morning and lie down next to you every night. I want to make love to you on our kitchen island as much as we want to. I want to sit with you on the back porch and watch you while you're lost in one of your books. I want to see your stomach getting bigger with our kids, and hell, I even want to fight with you and then have make-up sex. I want the world for both of us, and more than anything, I want to make all your dreams come true. I want to be your Prince Charming, Courtney. I want to be your everything. Will you marry me? ~ Kelly Elliott

If you ever say her name again, I will end you."

My heart takes up permanent residency in my throat. I bet he can see it pulsing in my neck. Once I manage to find a sliver of space to speak past it, I whisper, "Sorry, I'm afraid there's a queue. ~ Jewel E. Ann

Are you gay, Cherie?
Me, No… I'm not anything… I-I mean I prefer not to indulge, I stammered.
"Really... how do you mean?"
Well love has been an elusive story, like a fairytale adults tell children but I have never known any of it to be true. In reality it reminds me of religion. I am not sure God is real either, if God is real why do so many innocents suffer?
Innocents suffer because it is their destiny to suffer.
What? What does that mean?" I'm annoyed.
God has nothing to do with it. We are born into this world to experience all that is not God-like, so we can then be inspired to reach for higher spiritual goals.
I have never thought of it that way before. If that is so then I must be preparing for sainthood. Am I to think that all of my suffering as a child has been to prepare me for greatness? ~ Darwun St. James

During the day it is hard to remember that all the stars in the sky are out there all the time, even when I am too blinded by the sum to see them ~ Barbara Brown Taylor

The florid style is the reverse of the familiar. The last is employed as an unvarnished medium to convey ideas; the first is resorted to as a spangled veil to conceal the want of them. When there is nothing to be set down but words, it costs little to have them fine. ~ William Hazlitt

Now her hair is like the nights of disunion and separation and her face like the days of union and delectation; She hath a nose like the edge of the burnished blade and cheeks like purple wine or anemones blood-red: her lips as coral and carnelian shine and the water of her mouth is sweeter than old wine; its taste would quench Hell's fiery pain. Her tongue is moved by wit of high degree and ready repartee: her breast is a seduction to all that see it (glory be to Him who fashioned it and finished it!); and joined thereto are two upper arms smooth and rounded; She hath breasts like two globes of ivory, from whose brightness the moons borrow light, and a stomach with little waves as it were a figured cloth of the finest Egyptian linen made by the Copts, with creases like folded scrolls, ending in a waist slender past all power of imagination; based upon back parts like a hillock of blown sand, that force her to sit when she would fief stand, and awaken her, when she fain would sleep, And those back parts are upborne by thighs smooth and round and by a calf like a column of pearl, and all this reposeth upon two feet, narrow, slender and pointed like spear-blades, the handiwork of the Protector and Requiter, I wonder how, of their littleness, they can sustain what is above them. ~ Richard Burton

Mick had once come across one of Wilson't books and was surprised to see his face on the back cover. Mick was even more surprised when he read the book. It was pretty good, although Mick was kind of tired of hearing about Indians. Still, Mick thought, Aristotle Little Hawk was a good Indian, even if he was just some character in a book. He wished more Indians like Little Hawk hung out in the bar. He knew Wilson claimed he had some Indian blood, said so inside the book. But Mick did not buy that shit. Mick's great-grandmother was a little bit Indian, but that did not make him Indian. Besides, who the hell would want to be Indian when you could just as easily be white? ~ Sherman Alexie

Making good use of that room?" Lucius asked them, having a laugh with the trollop at his side. Oscar stood unwavering in the center of the hall, forcing Lucius to skirt around him.
"You're a pig," Camille replied, but he only squealed and snorted like a sow.
"Either of you figure out yet how we're going to get home?" Lucius asked. "Don't get me wrong. I'm perfectly content here for the time being."
A pair of sloppy-looking men stumbled through the front door, obviously drunk, and howling like wolves. Oscar stepped up beside Camille, blocking her from their view. His shoulders and chest were the perfect shield against whatever misguided attentions the men might show her.
"When did you become concerned about the three of us sticking together?" she asked Lucius. "We haven't set eyes on you since you disappeared into the orlop deck of the Londoner."
Lucius nodded over his shoulder. "I'm being nursed back to health, can't you see?"
She glared at him. Why someone like Lucius had survived the shipwreck instead of a worthier person like her father angered her. Maybe she really was cursed.
"You don't have a plan, do you?" Lucius asked Oscar, who continued to block Camille from the two men anxiously waiting by the front door for someone to greet them. Lucius snorted a laugh. "Should'a guessed as much."
Oscar took a step forward, pressing Camille between his chest and Lucius's.
"What do you mean by that?"
Lucius laced his fingers togethe ~ Angie Frazier

The properties of mind are not purely mental: They are shaped in crucial ways by the body and brain and how the body can function in everyday life. The embodied mind is thus very much of this world. Our flesh is inseparable from what Merleau-Ponty called the "flesh of the world" and what David Abram refers to as "the-more-than-human-world." Our body is intimately tied to what we walk on, sit on, touch, taste, smell, see, breathe, and move within. Our corporeality is part of the corporeality of the world. ~ George Lakoff

You'll read things and say, this is a really good project and it's probably going to be a hit, but I can see 20 other people playing that part. You have to have some sense of ownership to do a good job and be married to it for ever. ~ Eric Bana

One cannot create an art that speaks to men when one has nothing to say. ~ Andre Malraux

Wouldn't it be a beautiful world if just 10 percent of the people who believe in the power of love would compete with one another to see who could do the most good for the most people? ~ Muhammad Ali

When I was younger, I loved graveyards. They weren't spooky so much as mysterious. Each tombstone another story to uncover. Another life to learn about.
Now that I'm older - I won't say how old - I hate graveyards. The only life - or rather death - I see in the tombstones is my own. ~ Pseudonymous Bosch

I dozed, jolting occasionally at the driver's loud pronouncement of upcoming stops. At this early hour the bus hummed along quietly with few passengers, so the stops were infrequent. In the hazy surrealism of predawn, there really was not much to see
what I could make out was mainly countryside, though not what I would call quaint, and certainly no Shakespearean cottages or fairy folk peeping from the trees. ~ Carolyn Weber

The more conscious you become, the more you come into balance. Once balanced, you can choose to reject destruction; your awareness expands beyond the immediate hurt to see that evolution is eternal and therefore eternally possible. ~ Deepak Chopra

Feeling like you're enough has nothing to do with actually being enough --you choose whether or not you are. ~ Sara Raasch

The arguments for immortality, weak when you take them one by one, are no more cogent when you take them together ... For my part, I cannot see how consciousness can persist when its physical basis has been destroyed, and I am too sure of the interconnection of my body and my mind to think that any survival of my my consciousness apart from my body would be in any sense a survival of myself. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

I wasn't one of those people who went to see a play and said, 'I want to be an actor.' I fell into it. ~ Henry Czerny

He doesn't back down under my accusations. Instead he leans in, his big frame curving over me like a wave. "I would do all that and more." His tone betrays a carefully restrained ferocity, and I see in him, shifting and fluttering, behind his eyes the monster I've always known is there. It makes my breath catch, the beautiful horror of it. He doesn't try to hide it, if anything he leans in closer, filling my vision until he fills the world. Him and his dark devil's eyes. ~ Eliza Crewe

Recently I came across a Zen prayer that Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk, recites prior to eating: "In this plate of food, I see the entire universe supporting my existence." I like Hanh's meditation a lot because the wording allows me to include God in my gratitude without excluding gratitude to all the unseen human beings who also had a hand in the gift of the food in front of me. ~ Jacqueline A. Bussie

In 2003, as a 21-year-old convert to Islam, I moved from Colorado to Cairo to see what life was like in a Muslim country. ~ G. Willow Wilson

sufferings and loveliness were imagined, not incarnate in a specific body. But as I got to know them, I started to see more clearly how the people who came to the pantry were like me: messed up, often prickly or difficult, yearning for friendship. I saw how they were hungry, the way I was. And then, I had a glimpse of them being like Jesus again: as God, made flesh and blood. ~ Sara Miles

The world can do nothing to a Christian who has no fear of man. ~ Brother Yun

What is a living reality without experience? If there is anything about which we feel to be true, it is that the world we endure is authentic. We can see, touch and hear it. Our conscious existence of presence is an exhibition within the mind, but in many other occurrences, some of us rarely accept that we create our own realities. ~ Henry Johnson Jr

Sometimes there is nothing to hold me together. ~ Nora Raleigh Baskin

I just write the characters the way I see them. And maybe that's because I'm surrounded by the most amazing men,from my father to my husband to all of my brothers. They are true heroes! ~ Gena Showalter

I began to understand that my life was measured in moments. There were moments that tested you, challenged you, and moments that could make you fall to your knees, begging for one more moment but you see, those moments defined you as a person. You need to take them as they come because before you know it, you're out of moments. ~ Shey Stahl

What do the American people think? I am eager to know. I would like to believe the majority of Americans want to see Justice done, and they are not interested in financing the detention of innocent people. I know there is a small extremist minority that believes that everybody in this Cuban prison is evil, and that we are treated better than we deserve. But this opinion has no basis but ignorance. I am amazed that somebody can build such an incriminating opinion about people he or she doesn't even know. ~ Mohamedou Ould Slahi

And I had to be made blind before I could see. ~ Abigail Roux

I always imagined myself somehow as an electron around some atom, and you're just, like, bouncing around and spinning. There was a never-ending supply of places to go, people to see, things to do, and fitting it all in became kind of an art. ~ Tom Freston

I wouldn't like to see Cuba change in other ways. And the trouble is when Fidel [Castro] does go - I am sure he will at some stage. He will probably be replaced by some sort of Western capitalism, ultimately. ~ John Gimlette

I was 11 or 12 years old when I first saw 'Reservoir Dogs.' I remember after I saw that film, I kept renting it from the video store because I wanted all of my friends to see it. ~ Samm Levine

But the most reliable indication of the future of Open Source is its past: in just a few years, we have gone from nothing to a robust body of software that solves many different problems and is reaching the million-user count. There's no reason for us to slow down now. ~ Bruce Perens