The Emptiness Quotes

The emptiness where I used pain to fill the hole no longer controls me, no longer calls me because of you. ~ Abbi Glines

Emptiness is emptiness. San Francisco or Delhi. Wherever you go, the emptiness surrounds you. Silence will follow you wherever you go. ~ H.W.L. Poonja

Misery fills the emptiness that hope leaves behind when the world disappoints you. ~ Chris Colfer

If he could bottle her strength
and vitality, he would. He would take everything that
was Tessa and lock it into a corner of his heart, to take
out when the emptiness got too overwhelming. ~ Taryn Elliott

RED

Here's the red
The red of love
The fire that burns
Within my soul
The reddest red
I've ever known
The flame untouched
Ignited coal

Here's the red
The red of pain
That stinging pain
No one must know
The deepest red
I've ever felt
The emptiness
The mourning soul

Here's the red
The red I knew
That exalted fire
That once ignited you

The reddest red
I ever knew…

The deepest red
I ever knew… ~ Trisha North

On the most basic levels, I desire fullness, and fleshly lusts seduce me by attaching themselves to this basic desire. They exploit the empty spaces in me, and they promise that fulness will be mine if I give in to their demands. When my soul sits empty and is aching for something to fill it, such deceptive promises are extremely difficult to resist.

Consequently, the key to mortifying fleshly lusts is to eliminate the emptiness within me and replace it with fullness; and I accomplish this by feasting on the gospel. Indeed, it is in the gospel that I experience a God who glorifies Himself by filling me with His fullness. . . . This is the God of the gospel, a God who is satisfied with nothing less than my experience of fullness in Him! . . .

Indeed, as I perpetually feast on Christ and all His blessings found in the gospel, I find that my hunger for sin diminishes and the lies of lust simply lose their appeal. Hence, to the degree that I am full, I am free. Eyes do not rove, nor do fleshly lusts rule, when the heart is fat with the love of Jesus! ~ Milton Vincent

We are dust furrowed by the painful plough of Destiny to give birth to the emptiness of a time. ~ Sorin Cerin

Once, coming out of the cool, dark lab into the heat of the desert sun, he'd briefly wondered if the emptiness he'd been so staunchly guarding was, not the absence of memory, but actually a memory itself: a recollection of the blazing white potential that had existed before he was born. The emptiness an infant possesses in the very first moments, when consciousness begins like the answer to a question never asked. ~ Nicole Krauss

Q: Why do you think that people are so protective of their egos? Why is it so hard to let go of one's ego? A: People are afraid of the emptiness of space, or the absence of company, the absence of a shadow. It could be a terrifying experience to have no one to relate to, nothing to relate with. The idea of it can be extremely frightening, though not the real experience. It is generally a fear of space, a fear that we will not be able to anchor ourselves to any solid ground, that we will lose our identity as a fixed and solid and definite thing. This could be very threatening. ~ Chogyam Trungpa

We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at all. ~ G.K. Chesterton

The kind of music that God must hearing, no matter how busy or distracted, because it comes out of hundreds of square Miles of nothingness, out of the emptiness of the hills and the silence of the moors ... ~ Simon Armitage

Until I face the emptiness in my soul
and know this spirit within me,
I have not yet begun to live,
nor touched the face of God. ~ David W. Earle

All desires actually end in freedom. Your desire is fulfilled and you are empty. The emptiness brings you happiness, but it is unconscious. You attribute your happiness to a possession, not the emptiness. It is the freedom from desire that gives you happiness. ~ H.W.L. Poonja

The astronaut in his technical and complex machine, effortlessly orbiting the earth, alone and weightless in the emptiness of space, is the perfect symbol of man today. Despite our domination of the forces of nature and our highly developed technology, we have come to feel ourselves as empty, alienated, anxious, and lonely, without any real inner purpose or meaning to our existence. ~ Stephen Batchelor

TIME THERE SEEMED TO PASS DIFFERENTLY. WHEN YOU ARE shut off from the world, every day is exactly the same as the one before. This sameness has a way of wearing down your soul until you become nothing but a breathing, toiling, consuming thing that awakes to the sun and sleeps at the dawning of the dark. The emptiness runs deep, deeper with each slowing day, and you become increasingly invisible and inconsequential. That's how I felt at times, a tiny insect circling itself, only to continue, and continue. There, in that relentless vacuum, nothing moved. No news came in or out. No phone calls to or from anyone. ~ Suki Kim

Allow the emptiness inherent within actions and experiences to guide and shape your choices. Let your actions direct you, the actor, not the other way around. ~ Frederick Lenz

I think of the emptiness of outer space, and the men in their little pods going up there alone, wives and girlfriends left behind. I think of Abel and me lying on the grass, looking up at the stars, and how great that was, but, still, I was always waiting for him to turn his head. To look at me ~ Barbara Gowdy

However, she wouldn't be the first person to mistrust her nearest and dearest yet confide in the first stranger who comes along: a strange but true quirk of behaviour, whose root is easily traced to the human heart. Some people perhaps have nothing left to gain from those they live with; having revealed the emptiness of their souls, they secretly feel themselves to be judged with deserved severity; however, as they have a powerful craving for the flattery they need but lack, or a burning desire to appear to possess qualities they do not have, they hope to take by surprise the heart and esteem of those who are strangers to them, at the risk of one day falling from grace. ~ Honore De Balzac

Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness. ~ Richard Yates

On Sundays she got up early in order to have more time to do nothing.
The worst moment of her life was on that day at the end of the afternoon: she'd lapse into worried meditation, the emptiness of dry Sunday. She sighed. She missed being little - manioc flour - and thought she'd been happy. Actually even the worst childhood is always enchanted, how awful. ~ Clarice Lispector

Most people think that they want spacious homes, but they don't realize how the emptiness of a large room just amplifies the emptiness in a broken heart. And we're all broken, in one way or another. ~ Cassia Leo

For one unbelievable moment, the emptiness - the ache - that terrible hollow of desolation I'd lived with all this time was just – gone. ~ Julio Alexi Genao

Silence is a frightening thing. Silences leaves us at the mercy of the noise within us. We hear the fears that need to be faced. We hear, then, the angers that need to be cooled. We hear the emptiness that needs to be filled. We hear the cries for humility and reconciliation and centeredness. We hear ambition and arrogance and attitudes of uncaring awash in the shallows of the soul. Silence demands answers. Silence invites us to depth. Silence heals what hoarding and running will not touch. ~ Joan D. Chittister

An aching vacuum inside her sucking the air from her lungs. She hung her head and wept fiercely, the emptiness inside her growing larger not smaller; she felt as though it would grow so large it would suffocate her just as surely as the sea would have ~ Alan Brennert

An hour yesterday, an hour today, little-by-little, Tyler was bringing me back to life. I got a nervous fluttering in my belly wondering about our hour tomorrow. In these short spurts it felt good to focus on something other than the emptiness of missing Reece. But in the end, it all came back to him. ~ Danielle Sibarium

Thinking about somebody every day of his life ... oh yes, he said to himself. Oh yes, you do. You think about somebody. He fills your world. He is all about you, a presence, and you think about him; you can't help it, because he's always there, in your thoughts. But you know, of course, that all the while you're thinking about him, he's not thinking about you. That's the hardest thing about it. That's what makes it so very, very hard to bear. So hard that sometimes you just sit there and let the misery wash over you; the misery, the emptiness. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

The emptiness above was now mine within. It was a part of me, like a freckle, like a bruise. Like a middle name no one acknowledged. ~ Sarah Wineman

He could hear Donald saying something else but it didn't matter anymore what, because then and there it occurred to him that maybe the emptiness he'd been living with all this time hadn't really been emptiness at all, but loneliness gone unrecognized. How can a mind know how alone it is until it brushes up against some other mind? A single mark had been made, another person's memory imposed onto his mind, and now the magnitude of his own loss was impossible for Samson to ignore. It was breathtaking. He sank to his knees ... It was as if a match had been struck, throwing light on just how dark it was. ~ Nicole Krauss

Watch out for people who try to dazzle you with big words and intellectual double-talk. They want to drag you off into endless arguments that never amount to anything. They spread their ideas through the empty traditions of human beings and the empty superstitions of spirit beings. But that's not the way of Christ. Everything of God gets expressed in him, so you can see and hear him clearly. You don't need a telescope, a microscope, or a horoscope to realize the fullness of Christ, and the emptiness of the universe without him. When you come to him, that fullness comes together for you, too. His power extends over everything. 11-15 Entering into this fullness ~ Eugene H. Peterson

It was like I'd gone so long without the missing piece of my soul, I'd forgotten it was even missing. But after seeing you again, the emptiness I feel without you is unbearable. ~ J.B. Salsbury

The emptiness of the night shielded me from the gaze of others, from morality. ~ Tran Vu

Stars I understand. They shed light and give life. It is the emptiness between that haunts me. ~ Greg Bear

Minus: Papa, I'm scared. When I was hugging Karin in the boat, reality burst open. Do you understand?

David: I do.

Minus: Reality burst open, and I tumbled out. It's like a dream. Anything can happen. Anything.

David: I know.

Minus: I can't live in this new world.

David: Yes, you can. But you must have something to hold on to.

Minus: What would that be? A god? Give me proof of God. You can't.

David: Yes, I can. But you have to listen carefully.

Minus: Yes, I need to listen.

David: I can only give you a hint of my own hope. It is to know that love exists as something real in the human world.

Minus: A special kind of love, I suppose?

David: All kinds, Minus. The highest and the lowest, the most absurd and the most sublime. All kinds of love.

Minus: And the longing for love?

David: Longing and denial. Trust and distrust.

Minus: Then love is the proof?

David: I don't know if love is proof of God's existence, or if love is God himself.

Minus: To you, love and God are the same thing.

David: That thought helps me in my emptiness and despair.

Minus: Tell me more, Papa.

David: Suddenly the emptiness turns into abundance, and despair into life. It's like a reprieve, Minus, from a death sentence.

Minus: Papa... If it is as you say, then Karin is surrounded by God, since ~ Ingmar Bergman

Every man is ultimately groping in the dark, believing he has some understanding. Perhaps it is better thus. Perhaps we would go mad to realize what a thin skein of atmosphere protects us from the emptiness of outer space, what a thin layer of reason protects us from a reality far beyond our comprehension. ~ James Rozoff

There were times when she looked up from her labors to ask her mother a question - looking over to the chair where Beatrix had always sat - and was startled by the nothingness to be found there. It was like looking at a spot on a wall where a clock had hung for years, and seeing only an empty space. She could not train herself not to look; the emptiness surprised her every time. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Help me, Mother,' Peggy said, and tears came to her eyes as they always did when she spoke to her, because she would never get over the emptiness of a world that no longer held her mother. ~ Peggielene Bartels And Eleanor Herman

So this was her condition: here in the kitchen she knew who she was, here in the kitchen she was restless and bored, here in the kitchen she functioned admirably, here in the kitchen she despised what she did. She would become angry over the 'emptiness of a woman's life' as she called it, then laugh with a delight I can still hear when she analysed some complicated bit of business going on in the alley.

Passive in the morning, rebellious in the afternoon, she was made and unmade daily. She fastened hungrily on the only substance available to her, became affectionate toward her own animation, then felt like a collaborator. How could she not be devoted to a life of such intense division? And how could I not be devoted to her devotion? ~ Vivian Gornick

Surrounding the two of them was the love they shared but also an overwhelming feeling of fear
fear of a future filled with the emptiness which would consume them if they remained apart. A fear of a future of being separated forever, and it gripped both of their hearts, demanding preventative action. ~ Madison Thorne Grey

By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

She finally found the strength to wake up to the emptiness inside her. ~ Samantha Sotto

What people had had shed and left
a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes
those alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again. Now, day after day, light turned, like a flower reflected in water, its sharp image on the wall opposite. Only the shadows of the trees, flourishing in the wind, made obeisance on the wall, and for a moment darkened the pool in which light reflected itself; or birds, flying, made a soft spot flutter slowly across the bedroom floor. ~ Virginia Woolf

And now I lost my last treasure: the dreaming. For nothing in the dreams took the place of the human warmth I had witnessed. Now I felt utterly poor, because I could not create a human companion.

This hunger which had inhabited her entire being, which had thinned her blood, transpired through her bones, attacked the roots of her hair, given a fragility to her skin which was never to disappear entirely, had been so enormous that it had marked her whole being and her eyes with an indelible mark. Although her life changed and every want was filled later, this appearance of hunger remained. As if nothing could ever quite fill it. Her being had received no sun, no food, no air, no warmth, no love. It retained open pores of yearning and longing, mysterious spongy cells of absorption. The space between actuality, absolute deprivation, and the sumptuosity of her imagination could never be entirely covered. What she had created in the void, in the emptiness, in the bareness continued to shame all that was offered her, and her large, infinitely blue eyes continued to assert the immensity of her hunger. ~ Anais Nin

Perhaps this is what it means to go mad: to be emptied and to be aware of the emptiness. ~ David Foster Wallace

The emptiness made her insides ache. ~ Anna McPartlin

In a man like Friedrich von Schlegel the courage to be as an individual self produced complete neglect of participation, but it also produced, in reaction to the emptiness of this self-affirmation, the desire to return to a collective. Schlegel, and with him many extreme individualists in the last hundred years, became Roman Catholics. The courage to be as oneself broke down, and one turned to an institutional embodiment of the courage to be as a part. ~ Paul Tillich

The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters - there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void ... That's why the slightest technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of the presenter becomes so exciting, for it reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us through this little window. ~ Jean Baudrillard

Biju knew he probably wouldn't see him again. This was what happened, he had learned by now. You lived intensely with others, only to have them disappear overnight, since the shadow class was condemned to movement. The men left for other jobs, towns, got deported, returned home, changed names. Sometimes someone came popping around a corner again, or on the subway, then they vanished again. Adresses, phone numbers did not hold. The emptiness Biju felt returned to him over and over, until eventually he made sure not to let friendships sink deep anymore./The Inheritance of Loss ~ Kiran Desai

Valek's thoughts returned to Yelena. An icy finger of loneliness touched the emptiness inside him. She was in Sitia, where she needed to be to learn about her magical powers, but she had taken his heart with her. ~ Maria V. Snyder

He felt as if his heart had dried up. I needed her he thought. I needed someone like her to fill the void inside me. But I wasn't able to fill the void inside her. Until the bitter end, the emptiness inside her was hers alone. ~ Haruki Murakami

Ignore the pithiness, look for the goodness.
Fill the emptiness with love and kindness. ~ Debasish Mridha

We imprint our intimacies upon atoms born from an explosion so great it still marks the emptiness of space. A ~ Anthony Marra

The same is true for those who do not work hard to find
a good and rewarding job, perform the kind of work they
like to do, and secure a good position in their chosen
career. Even if they achieve a good standard of living, no
amount of material wealth can relieve the emptiness in
their hearts. They experience the same anxious spiritual
state. They live a life of discontentment because they are
so passionately attached to this world, they remain ambitious
for wealth and possessions, and they regard everything
and everyone around them as simply another opportunity
for personal profit. ~ Harun Yahya

And he leans in, so carefully. Breathing
and not breathing and hearts beating
between us and he's so close, he's so close and I can't feel my legs anymore. I can't feel my fingers or the cold or the emptiness of this room because all I feel is him, everywhere,filling everything and he whispers
"Please."
He says "Please don't shoot me for this."
And he kisses me.
His lips are softer than anything I've ever known, soft like a first snowfall, like biting into cotton candy, like melting and floating and being weightless in water. It's sweet, it's
so effortlessly sweet.
And then it changes.
"Oh God - "
He kisses me again, this time stronger,
desperate, like he has to have me, like he's dying to memorize the feel of my lips against his own. The taste of him is making me crazy; he's all heat and desire and peppermint and I want more. I've just begun reeling him in, pulling him into me when he breaks away.
He's breathing like he's lost his mind andhe's looking at me like something has brokeninside of him, like he's woken up to find that
his nightmares were just that, that they never existed, that it was all just a bad dream that felt far too real but now he's awake and he's safe and everything is going to be okay and
I'm falling.
I'm falling apart and into his heart and I'm a disaster. ~ Tahereh Mafi

Dreams are the eraser dust I blow off my page.
They fade into the emptiness, another dark gray day.
Dreams are only memories of the plans I had back then.
Dreams are eraser dust and now I use a pen. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

There is an art in the emptiness of all natural things. ~ Nikita Gill

As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, - Listen and do not hear - the tongue moves but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me - that I let Him have free hand. ~ Mother Teresa

In the emptiness that was all around me, I noticed an old tennis ball in the plantings; I picked it up and dropped it at Zoë's feet. I didn't know what I was doing, if I had a specific intention. Was I trying to lighten the mood? I don't know, but I felt I had to do something. So there the ball bounced to a stop at her bare feet.
She looked down at the ball but did nothing with it.
Maxwell noticed what I had done, and he noticed Zoë's lack of reaction. He picked up the ball and, with a mighty heave, threw it so far into the woods behind the house that I lost sight of it and could only barely hear it crash through the leaves of bushes on its way back to earth. It was quite an impressive toss, the pale tennis ball sailing through the air against the clear blue sky. What amount of psychic pain was expended on that ball, I had no idea. ~ Garth Stein

I realized that your mother couldn't see the emptiness, she couldn't see anything ... All of the words I'd written to her over all of those years, had I never said anything to hear at all? ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere. ~ Walker Percy

She rebelled against the emptiness and meaninglessness of her life. She hoped that when Bruce was her age he too would rebel if he found his life intolerable. She hoped he would want to do something about it; anything was better than to submit to your fate supinely. ~ Emilie Loring

Reality is neither subjective nor objective, neither mind nor matter, neither time nor space. These divisions need somebody to happen to, a conscious separate center. But reality is all and nothing, the totality and the exclusion, the fullness and the emptiness, fully consistent, absolutely paradoxical. You cannot speak about it, you can only lose yourself in it. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

I just remembered a time when to warm up my spirit I prayed: movement is spirit. Prayer was a means of mutely and hidden from others reaching myself. When I prayed I achieved an emptiness of soul - and that emptiness is all I can ever have. Besides that, nothing. But the emptiness has the value and appearance of plenty. One way of getting is not looking, one way of having is not asking and only believing that the silence I believe to be inside me is the answer to my - to my mystery. ~ Clarice Lispector

I do not know how much money Britney Spears earned last year.. However, I do know that it's not enough for me to want her life, were I given the option to have it. Every day, random people use Britney's existence as currency; they talk about her public failures and her lack of talent as a way to fill the emptiness of their own normalcy. She - alone with Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton and all those androids from The Hills - are the unifying entities within this meta era. In a splintered society, they are the means through which people devoid of creativity communicate with each other. THey allow Americans to understand who they are and who they are not; they allow Americans to unilaterally agree on something they never needed to consciously consider. A person like Britney Spears surrenders her privacy and her integrity and the rights to her own persona, and in exchange we give her huge sums of money. But she still doesn't earn a fraction of what she warrants in free-trade economy. If Britney Spears were paid $1 every time a self-loathing stranger used her as a surrogate for his own failure, she would out earn Warren Buffet in three months. This is why entertainers (and athletes) make so much revenue but are still wildly underpaid: We use them for things that are worth more than money. It's a new kind of dehumanizing slavery - not as awful as the literal variety, but dehumanizing nonetheless. ~ Chuck Klosterman

There was the emptiness of space I was afraid to fall into, but the only real fear I'd ever actually had was to dive into the emptiness inside of myself. ~ Orson De Witt

I don't wanna say goodbye for the summer Knowing the love we'll miss Oh let us make a pledge to meet in September And seal it with a kiss Guess it's gonna be a cold lonely summer But I'll fill the emptiness I'll send you all my love every day in a letter Sealed with a kiss. ~ Bobby Vinton

I have not lost my fascination with death. I have not become a noticeably less intense person. I have not, nor will I ever, completely lose the longing for that something, that thing that I believe will fill an emptiness inside me. I do believe that the emptiness was made greater by the things that I did to myself. ~ Marya Hornbacher

My soul spoke to me in a whisper, urgently and alarmingly: 'Words, words, do not make too many words. Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness, and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are all completely mired in madness?' "11 (2) Jung's soul: "There are hellish webs of words, only words . . . Be tentative with words, value them . . . for you are the first who gets snared in them. For words have meanings. With words you pull up the underworld. Word, the paltriest and the mightiest. In words the emptiness and the fullness flow together. Hence the word is an image of the God. ~ C. G. Jung

Tearing down the rest of the world won't make you happy. Look inside yourself. Because finding who you were meant to be? What you were put into this world to do? That's what fills the emptiness. It's the only things that can. ~ A.G. Howard

Weight loss does not make people happy. Or peaceful. Being thin does not address the emptiness that has no shape or weight or name. Even a wildly successful diet is a colossal failure because inside the new body is the same sinking heart. ~ Geneen Roth

During his illness he had spent every minute of consciousness calling upon God, every second of every minute. Ya Allah whose servant lies bleeding do not abandon me now after watching oven me so long. Ya Allah show me some sign, some small mark of your favour, that I may find in myself the strength to cure my ills. O God most beneficent most merciful, be with me in this my time of need, my most grievous need. Then it occurred to him that he was being punished, and for a time that made it possible to suffer the pain, but after a time he got angry. Enough, God, his unspoken words demanded, why must I die when I have not killed, are you vengeance or are you love? The anger with God carried him through another day, but then it faded, and in its place there came a terrible emptiness, an isolation, as he realized he was talking to _thin air_, that there was nobody there at all, and then he felt more foolish than ever in his life, and he began to plead into the emptiness, ya Allah, just be there, damn it, just be. But he felt nothing, nothing nothing, and then one day he found that he no longer needed there to be anything to feel. On that day of metamorphosis the illness changed and his recovery began. And to prove to himself the non-existence of God, he now stood in the dining-hall of the city's most famous hotel, with pigs falling out of his face. ~ Salman Rushdie

More than shame he felt cold, hollow fear in him. The fear was still there like a cold slimy hollow in all the emptiness where once his confidence had been and it made him feel sick. It was still there with him now. It ~ Ernest Hemingway,

The morning's recollection of the emptiness of the day before. Its anticipation of the emptiness of the day to come. ~ David Markson

Happy in his sorrow is he who at the death of one dear to him can weep all his tears over the emptiness, the desolation, and the loneliness. Sorer and bitterer are the tears with which you try to atone for the past when you have failed in love toward one who is gone and to whom you can never make amends for what you have sinned.

There is nothing you can expiate any more, nothing. Now there is abundance of love in your heart, now that it is too late. Go now to the cold grave with your full heart! Does it bring you any nearer? Plant flowers and bind wreaths--does that help you? ~ Jens Peter Jacobsen

Men love death. In everything they make, they hollow out a central place for death, let its rancid smell contaminate every dimension of whatever still survives. Men especially love murder. In art they celebrate it, and in life they commit it. They embrace murder as if life without it would be devoid of passion, meaning, and action, as if murder were solace, stilling their sobs as they mourn the emptiness and alienation of their lives. ~ Andrea Dworkin

Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened,
like winter, which even now is passing.
For beneath the winter is a winter so endless
that to survive it at all is a triumph of the heart.

Be forever dead in Eurydice, and climb back singing.
Climb praising as you return to connection.
Here among the disappearing, in the realm of the transient,
be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings.

Be. And, at the same time, know what it is not to be.
The emptiness inside you allows you to vibrate
in full resonance with your world. Use it for once.

To all that has run its course, and to the vast unsayable
numbers of beings abounding in Nature,
add yourself gladly, and cancel the cost. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I was feverish; I couldn't keep down food. Orma stayed by me the entire time, and I suffered the illusion that behind his skin - behind everyone's - was a hollow nothingness, an inky black void. He rolled up my sleeve to look at my arm, and I shrieked, believing he would peel back my skin and see the emptiness beneath it. ~ Rachel Hartman

If we lived for ever, what you say would be true. But we have to die, we have to leave life presently. Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived for ever. As it is, we must hold to other things, because Death is coming. I love death - not morbidly, but because He explains. He shows me the emptiness of Money. Death and Money are the eternal foes. Not Death and Life. . . . Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him. Behind the coffins and the skeletons that stay the vulgar mind lies something so immense that all that is great in us responds to it. Men of the world may recoil from the charnel-house that they will one day enter, but Love knows better. Death is his foe, but his peer, and in their age-long struggle the thews of Love have been strengthened, and his vision cleared, until there is no one who can stand against him. ~ E. M. Forster

What you discovered, gradually, was that only by structuring your own life pitilessly could you achieve anything fulfilling. Only by applying yourself to something arbitrary and pointless – and yet, crucially, of your own devising – could you escape the emptiness of unstructured diversion. In order to transcend pointlessness, you needed to become the merciless organiser of pointlessness. ~ Momus

You had felt idle in this city through which you had paced only to kill time. But the emptiness that you believed yourself confronted with was an illusion: you had filled those moments with sensations all the more powerful in that nothing and no one had distracted you from them. ~ Edouard Leve

Tonight marked the end of the only chapter in my life I'd ever known, and I didn't know how to live in the emptiness ahead. ~ Aimee Carter

I have overspread the world like a syrup and the emptiness of it it's terrifying, but there is no dislodging the seed; the seed has become a little knot of cold fire which roars like a sun in the vast hollow of the dead carcass. ~ Henry Miller

The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running. ~ Willa Cather

People jump back and forth in pursuit of pleasures only because they see the emptiness of their lives more clearly than they do the emptiness of whichever new entertainment attracts them ~ Leo Tolstoy

I relinquished myself to existence pure and simple, thinking absolutely nothing - as if my mind were merely an echo chamber for the music, as if it contained only ether or at most a vaguely pleasant odor as of roses preserved between the pages of a book, their significance long forgotten. The tongue of the road gobbled me up and I allowed myself to sink like a tasty mouthful all the way to the bottom of a marvelous, rejuvenating vacuity. Later, it would occur to me it's the emptiness we mistakenly call Innocence. ~ Sol Luckman

I scrub my skin
to rid me from you
and I still don't know why I cried.
It was just something in the way you took my heart and rearranged my insides and I couldn't recognise the emptiness you left me with when you were done. Maybe you thought my insides would fit better this way, look better this way, to you and us and all the rest.
But then you must have changed your mind
or made a wrong
because why did you
leave? ~ Charlotte Eriksson

The future exists only in our imagination
it is a collective story waiting for our voices to express
that can only happen when you and I are willing to enter the emptiness
listening in the silence
until we can begin to create a future we can befriend. ~ Dawna Markova

Garion,' she said very calmly, 'the universe knew your name before that moon up there was spun out of the emptiness. Whole constellations have been waiting for you since the beginning of time.'
I didn't want them to, Aunt Pol.'
There are those of us who aren't given that option, Garion. There are things that gave to be done and certain people who have to do them. It's as simple as that.'
He smiled rather sadly at her flawless face and gently touched the snowy white lock at her brow. Then, for the last time in his life, he asked the question that had been on his lips since he was a tiny boy. 'Why me, Aunt Pol? Why me?'
Can you possibly think of anyone else you'd trust to deal with these matters, Garion?'
He had not really been prepared for that question. It came at him in stark simplicity. Now at last he fully understood. 'No,' he sighed, 'I suppose not. Somehow it seems a little unfair, though. I wasn't even consulted.'
Neither was I, Garion,' she answered. 'But we didn't have to be consulted, did we? The knowledge of what we have to do is born into us. ~ David Eddings

The house was an immense place, isolated in a great wooded area. The building and the trees seemed wet, glistening dimly in the grey morning light that was much like the light of midday of Anthea. It was refreshing to his over-sensitive eyes. He liked the woods, the quiet sense of life in them, and the glistening moisture - the sense of water and of fruitfulness that this earth overflowed with, even down to the continual trilling and chirping sounds of the insects. It would be an endless source of delight compared to his own world, with the dryness, the emptiness, the soundlessness of the broad, empty deserts between the almost deserted cities where the only sound was the whining of the cold and endless wind that voiced the agony of his own, dying people..... ~ Walter Tevis

More and more believers are tasting the same despair the world lives in because they have chosen to "walk ... as other Gentiles walk, in the [emptiness] of their mind."8 ~ Jim Berg

What else are there but rituals
To cover up the emptiness
O Disbelief

Lord Nothingness
When my son's suffering ended
My own began

Why did the sun rise this morning
It's not natural
I don't want to see the light

It's not time to close the casket
Or say Kaddish for my son
I've already buried two fathers

With a mother to come
Isn't that enough Lord who wants us
To exalt and sanctify Him

I don't want to wear the mourner's ribbon
Or wake up crying every morning
For God knows how long

I don't want to tuck my son into the ground
As if we were putting him to bed
For the last time ~ Edward Hirsch

If someone dies of anything other than extreme old age and natural causes, and often even then the death leaves a great void in the lives of the survivors, an emptiness like an abandoned mine that can never be filled. A deep chasm. If you're lucky, you might be able to cover it with plywood and rebar, to surround it with chain link and "Danger" signs, but at best, these are only ever temporary remedies, patches that might briefly hold up to the storms that will come and come again until the ground around the chasm grows so weakened and diminished that to approach the emptiness becomes ever more dangerous. And that's if you're lucky. If you're not, then the loss leaves a void as dark and desolate as a black hole, with a gravity so great that no light can escape. ~ Tyler Dilts

The best way I have ever found to fill that hole is not to seek external motivations to fill the emptiness, but to ignite the internal fire that will never go out. To light up my own inner sky. ~ James Altucher

The emptiness of the things of this life, the incompleteness of even its highest pleasures, and their utter powerlessness to make us really happy, has been, at least for fifteen hundred years, a commonplace, both with saints and sages. ~ William Hurrell Mallock

He wagged his tail, and his whole body tingled. He realized the emptiness inside was not filled with happiness. Blue felt a glow within that was a result of more than just the warm sunshine on a spring day.
It was more than just the gentle tumble of the waterfall, or the wind or the sound of birds. It was much, much more he knew. He looked about him and he knew he had found what he had been looking for.
He had found more than his true heart's desire ...
He had found a forever home! ~ Michael Delaware

Look inside yourself. Because finding who you were meant to be? What you were put into this world to do? That's what fills the emptiness. It's the only thing that can. ~ A.G. Howard

I will take with me the emptiness of my hands. What you do not have you find everywhere ~ W.S. Merwin

I need you, Desari. I was empty without you. And that kind of emptiness eats away at you, consumes you until your soul is dark and ugly and all that matters is sating your hunger. But nothing fills the void.Nothing. Year after year you endure the emptiness until life itself is a curse hardly to be borne. And all the while the darkness, the beast in you whispers, an insidious whisper promising power from the kill,promises that wear away your belief in God,in all the things that are right and true and good.The monster inside you,so black and hungry for life, grows and grows until it has consumed everything you ever were. That is the curse born by Carpathian males, Desari. ~ Christine Feehan

But the most dangerous thing that camp had taught me was the awful lesson of country living: out there, in the open, in the quiet, all the emptiness pressed itself up against you, pawed at the very center of your heart, convinced you to make friends with loneliness. ~ Kaitlyn Greenidge

she'd left, feeling the emptiness of the big theater ~ Anthony Doerr