Vacancy Quotes

She did not replace my mother; no one could do that; but she came into a vacancy in my heart, which closed upon her, and I felt towards her something I have never felt for any other human being ~ Charles Dickens

..my feelings for the countryside…the beauty and the wildness, the enchantment of so much colour and life and warmth of the sun. Most people are restless in the country, they feel a vacancy, and want to get back to the shops and pavements and traffic; what they call life. Sometimes this war seems to have come directly out of that restlessness. ~ Henry Williamson

His fear-inflamed mind sent the control-signal to his finger-joint to fold back. The trigger sliced back. The blast seemed to lift the booth clear off the floor, drop it down again. A pin-wheel of vacancy appeared in the glass, flinging off shards and slivers. ~ Cornell Woolrich

I very much wanted to live in Paris when I was in the army, and I was quite determined to. I could have become a dress designer: Dior was willing to take me on as an assistant, but he did not have an immediate vacancy. ~ Paul Johnson

All my life, as down an abyss without a bottom. I have been pouring van loads of information into that vacancy of oblivion I call my mind. ~ Logan Pearsall Smith

I was staring at her and not wanting to blink. I was doing my best to ignore the voice of reason in the back of my mind.
Hunter, turn your ass around.
I took one step further into the motel's lobby.
Do not speak. Leave.
"Hi." I crossed the remaining distance to the counter.
"Um, hi," she squeaked, then cleared her throat. "Hello. Hi. Uh, good morning." The flush of her cheeks was so fucking beautiful, my heart pumped double time.
Whatever you do, shit-for-brains, do not ask for a room. You have a plan, remember?
"I was wondering if you have a vacancy?"
Fuckwad ~ Devney Perry

Birth and death: there was the same consciousness of heightened existence and of her own elevated importance ~ J.K. Rowling

The inspection of these chasms brought him a second pulsation of that old horror which he had used to describe to Viviette as produced in him by bottomlessness in the north heaven. The ghostly finger of limitless vacancy touched him now on the other side. ~ Thomas Hardy

Lord, give us righteous judges who will not try to legislate and dominate this society. Take control, Lord! We ask for additional vacancies on the court. ~ Pat Robertson

Silence can bring with it a vacancy that in its turn craves the distraction of the human voice or the obscuring impact created...by music. These distractions can help to stifle the terror of being abandoned to the silence of the noisy mind. ~ Juliet Nicolson

A week goes by and I don't call Lucy or Dylan. I want to drift away from them - more than anything, I want to drift away. I sometimes imagine myself totally alone and I enjoy the feeling. And I mean something by alone, something more than the word holds. I mean something blank and pure and vacant, plus me. And also moral. This blank and pure vacancy that includes me that is also moral is so empty, it is so no one, that my presence in it makes me not exist, although I am still there, and that's what lifts all the weight. ~ Patrick Somerville

He suspended thinking; his mind was a bloody vacancy, like a room in which there has been a butchering. ~ Michael Shaara

I will say one thing has changed dramatically which is this Supreme Court vacancy, and it will reshape the race on my side, because I'd rather lose an election than lose the Supreme Court. ~ Hugh Hewitt

I think, again, on issues of energy, how are we going to fully utilize our energy resources in this country? What is the role of the federal government in higher education? What kind of justices would you appoint to the Supreme Court, not just because we have a vacancy now, but at least one or two potentially in the next four to eight years? ~ Marco Rubio

A solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity. ~ Mark Twain

It is one thing to speak of embracing the new, the fresh, the strange. It is another to feel that one is an insect, crawling across a page of the Encyclopedia Britannica, knowing only that something vast is passing by beneath, all without your sensing more than a yawning vacancy. ~ Gregory Benford

and Anthony,
Enthroned i'th'market-place, did sit alone
Whistling to th'air, which but for vacancy
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,
And made a gap in Nature. ~ William Shakespeare

There are many kinds of silences and not all signify absence or vacancy....Those moments are but temporary ebbs before the flow of meaning rushes in to fill the space....God may be speaking 'in ways we have yet to recognize as speech. ~ Terryl L. Givens

Hours later there came a change. It began to grow light in the bus. The greyness outside the
windows turned from mud-colour to mother of pearl, then to faintest blue, then to a bright blueness that stung the eyes. We seemed to be floating in a pure vacancy. There were no lands, no sun, no stars in sight: only the radiant abyss. ~ C.S. Lewis

Now." After Ifemelu hung up, still amused, she decided to change the title of her blog to Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black. Job Vacancy in America - National Arbiter in Chief of "Who Is Racist" In America, racism exists but racists are all gone. Racists belong to the past. Racists are the thin-lipped mean white people in the movies about the civil rights era. Here's the thing: the manifestation of racism has changed but the language has not. So if you haven't ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

But it was no good trying to tell about the beauty. It was just that life was beautiful beyond belief, and that is a kind of joy which has to be lived.

Sometimes, when they came down from the cirrus levels to catch a better wind, they would find themselves among the flocks of cumulus: huge towers of modeled vapor, looking as white as Monday's washing d as solid as meringues. Perhaps one of these piled-up blossoms of the sky, these snow-white droppings of a gigantic Pegasus, would lie before them several miles away. They would set their course toward it, seeing it grow bigger silently and imperceptibly, a motionless growth; and then, when they were at it, when they were about to bang their noses with a shock against its seeming solid mass, the sun would dim. Wraiths of mist suddenly moving like serpents of the air would coil about them for a second. Grey damp would be around them, and the sun, a copper penny, would fade away. The wings next to their own wings would shade into vacancy, until each bird was a lonely sound in cold annihilation, a presence after uncreation. And there they would hang in chartless nothing, seemingly without speed or left or right or top or bottom, until as suddenly as ever the copper penny glowed and the serpents writhed. Then, in a moment of time, they would be in the jeweled world once more: a sea under them like turquoise and all the gorgeous palaces of heaven new created, with the dew of Eden not yet dry. ~ T.H. White

From the beginning of my sojourn in this world there was a persistent vacancy in me where the industry ought to be. (Ought to was is better, perhaps, though the most of the authorities differ as to this. ~ Mark Twain

If the mind is wearied by study, or the body worn with sickness,It is well to lie fallow for a while, in the vacancy of sheer amusement ;But when thou prosprest in health, and thine intellect can soar untired,To seek uninstructive pleasure is to slumber on the couch of indolence. ~ Martin Farquhar Tupper

Mathic architects were helpless when it came to walls. Pillars they could do. Arches they were fine with. Vaults, which were just three-dimensional arches, they knew everything about. But ask them to construct a simple wall and they would go to pieces. Where anyone else in the world would construct a wall, they'd fill in the space with a system of arches and tracery. When people complained about wind, vermin, and other things that would be kept out of a normal building by walls, they might be troubled to fill up a vacancy with a stained-glass window. But we hadn't got round to putting all of those in yet. On a windy and rainy day it made buildings like this hellish. But on a day like this one it was fine because you could always see. As we scaled the flights of the southwestern tower we had views down into the Mynster, and out over the concent. ~ Neal Stephenson

A single assembly is apt to grow ambitious, and after a time will not hesitate to vote itself perpetual. This was one fault of the Long Parliament; but more remarkably of Holland, whose assembly first voted themselves from annual to septennial, then for life, and after a course of years, that all vacancies happening by death or otherwise, should be filled by themselves, without any application to constituents at all. ~ John Adams

you
have been
taught your legs
are a pitstop for men
that need a place to rest
a vacancy, body empty enough
for guests cause no one
ever comes and is
willing to
stay ~ Rupi Kaur

His eyes they held the most dangerous thing, they held the top of the sins. Indifference. Indifference. A vacancy where human care should be. ~ Nina MacLaughlin

The importation of foreigners into a country that has as many inhabitants as the present employments and provisions for subsistence will bear, will be in the end no increase of people, unless the new comers have more industry and frugality than the natives, and then they will provide more subsistence, and increase in the country; but they will gradually eat the natives out. Nor is it necessary to bring in foreigners to fill up any occasional vacancy in a country for such vacancy will soon be filled by natural generation. ~ Benjamin Franklin

Tom got out a bit of paper and carefully unrolled it. Huckleberry viewed it wistfully. The temptation was very strong. At last he said: "Is it genuwyne?" Tom lifted his lip and showed the vacancy. "Well, all right," said Huckleberry, "it's a trade." Tom enclosed the tick in the percussion-cap box that had lately been the pinchbug's prison, and the boys separated, each feeling wealthier than before. ~ Mark Twain

But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing. From my earliest remembrance I had been as I then was in height and proportion. I had never yet seen a being resembling me or who claimed any intercourse with me. What was I? The question again recurred, to be answered only with groans. ~ Mary Shelley

And the dog by the fender stretched himself out in the luxuriant vacancy of mind only known to dogs surrounded by a happy group of their friends. ~ Christopher Morley

No one stands on the top of the world. Not you, not me, not even gods. But the unbearable vacancy of the throne in the sky is over. From now on ... I will be sitting on it. ~ Tite Kubo

Anyone who is willing to work and is serious about it will certainly find a job. Only you must not go to the man who tells you this, for he has no job to offer and doesn't know anyone who knows of a vacancy. This is exactly the reason why he gives you such generous advice, out of brotherly love, and to demonstrate how little he knows the world. ~ B. Traven

You're not supposed to dislike your own child. You were supposed to like them no matter what, even if they were not what you wanted. ~ J.K. Rowling

If there is any thing which may properly be called happiness here below, I am persuaded it is in the union of two persons who love each other with perfect liberty, who are united by a secret inclination, and satisfied with each other's merit; their hearts are full and leave no vacancy for any other passion; they enjoy perpetual tranquillity, because they enjoy content ~ Heloise D'Argenteuil

If in an actor there appears an utter vacancy of meaning, a frigid equality, a stupid languor, a torpid apathy, the greatest kindness that can be shown him is a speedy sentence of expulsion. ~ Samuel Johnson

How cold the vacancy
When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist
First sees reality. The mortal no
Has its emptiness and tragic expirations. ~ Wallace Stevens

The Human Condition has a vacancy ... a transient declaring It's Self The Victor! Till death do us part in This War for human isolation. ~ Rosemarie Yusen

History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices may be found in museums, where they span everybody's own vacancy. ~ Robert Smithson

I walk the straight lines. I walk through the summer nights. I walk the silver rope of dreams. I walk through dawns of dawns. There's not a lot that isn't dying. I see people parading in front of each other like insects in a killing jar, watching each other die. I walk the straight lines through the Christ machines. Through the eyes of the throwaway people. Through the wards and the shores and the cracks in the skulls of the sidewalks. Through love's howling vacancy. I am the freedom soil. I dig my own grave. I resurrect myself every night. I am all things to myself. I walk the straight lines. I walk the spider's jailhouse. I walk the think line, the thin line, the white line and all the lines in between. I wish I could trade in my eyes. ~ Henry Rollins

Few people realize the immensity of vacancy. ~ H.G.Wells

It is a naked city. Faith is not pampered, nor hope encouraged; there is no place to lay one's exhaustion: but instead pinnacles skewer it undisguised against vacancy. ~ William Gaddis

Joshua said nothing, for his mind was even now limning the vacancy. Lincoln would no more be seated on the far side of the dining table. He would no more ride his horse into town or let his huge hands rove through the library of stroll past the hemp house or listen to Eliza gabble or applaud Mary's nocturnes or argue some abstruse point of law with James or scratch behind Growler's ears as the dog lay stretched around his feet. From henceforth, there would be only space where Lincoln used to be.
And in Joshua's mind, that space began to expand and deepen until it became a vast nullity, blanketing everything around him until it seemed the night itself had been swallowed up by it. ~ Louis Bayard

A hole is a space where everything has been moved out so that opportunity has space to move in. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Fifth wheel employees are those who are a result of the mistake made by the human resources wing, i.e. by recruiting wrong person to the wrong job just to fill in the vacancy and then expect better performance. Further such an employee is unable to put in his best and is just an additional mass available within the organization. ~ Henrietta Newton Martin

This ... hole in the world, man-shaped. Me-shaped. A vacancy. ~ Jasinda Wilder

Fats and Andrew were perhaps equally aware that the admiration in their relationship flowed mostly from Andrew to Fats; but Fats alone suspected that he needed Andrew more than Andrew needed him. ~ J.K. Rowling

One thing I learned about the Danes was that they knew how to spy. The monks who write the chronicles tell us that they came from nowhere, their dragon-prowed ships suddenly appearing from a blue vacancy, but it was rarely like that. The Viking crews might attack unexpectedly, but the big fleets, the war fleets, went where they knew there was already trouble. They found an existing wound and filled it like maggots. ~ Bernard Cornwell

The vacancy left by absence of worship is filled by mere killing of time and by boredom, which is directly related to inability to enjoy leisure; for one can only be bored if the spiritual power to be leisurely has been lost. There is an entry in Baudelaire ... One must work, if not from taste then at least from despair. For, to reduce everything to a single truth: work is less boring than pleasure. ~ Josef Pieper

Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims. ~ H.G.Wells

They would set their course toward it, seeing it grow bigger silently and imperceptibly, a motionless growth
and then, when they were at it, when they were about to bang their noses with a shock against its seeming solid mass, the sun would dim. Wraiths of mist suddenly moving like serpents of the air would coil about them for a second. Grey damp would be around them, and the sun, a copper penny, would fade away. The wings next to their own wings would shade into vacancy, until each bird was a lonely sound in cold annihilation, a presence after uncreation. And there they would hang in chartless nothing, seemingly without speed or left or right or top or bottom, until as suddenly as ever the copper penny glowed and the serpents writhed. ~ T.H. White

Action is transitory, a step, a blow,
The motion of a muscle, this way or that,
'Tis done
And in the after-vacancy,
We wonder at ourselves, like men betrayed. ~ William Wordsworth

The infinity of this vacancy, the pervasive pain, the longing for some spirit, some lightness, some joy - that's all that is left. ~ Martha Manning

Would the realization of Sukhvinder's desperation lead, at last, to some crack in her mother's implacable disapproval, her disappointment, her endless stone-faced criticism? ~ J.K. Rowling

Your death and my death are mainly of importance to ourselves. The black plumes will be stripped off our hearses within the hour; tears will dry, hurt hearts close again, our graves grow level with the church-yard, and although we are away, the world wags on. It does not miss us; and those who are near us, when the first strangeness of vacancy wears off, will not miss us much either. ~ Alexander Smith

Most of us probably fall several times a day into a fit somewhat like this: The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the sounds of the world melt into a confused unity, the attention is dispersed so that the whole body is felt, as it were, at once, and the foreground of consciousness is filled, if by anything, by a sort of solemn sense of surrender to the empty passing of time. In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot start; the pensée de derrière la tête [thought at the back of the head] fails to pierce the shell of lethargy that wraps our state about. Every moment we expect the shell to break, for we know no reason why it should continue. But it does continue, pulse after pulse, and we float with it, until - also without reason that we can discover - an energy is given, something - we know not what - enables us to gather ourselves together, we wink our eyes, we shake our head, the background ideas become effective, and the wheels of life go round again. ~ William James

Beyond the queues, the vacancy screens listed jobs in a multitude of languages. Invariably, they were low-paid and short-term dead-ends. Nearby, people in headphones sat at a bank of machines: the blind and the illiterate force-fed with 'opportunities' by soothing machine voices. On the far wall, in large print, a poster declared: BEGGARS CANNOT BE CHOOSERS. ~ Mark Cantrell

Appointing a sitting federal appellate judge also gives a president a unique twofer opportunity, creating a lower-court vacancy that the president can fill with a second (presumably supportive) appointee. If a sitting federal appellate judge placed on the Supreme Court is in turn replaced by a sitting federal trial judge, a president can turn a single Supreme Court vacancy into three judicial appointments. ~ Anonymous

Not Chaos, not the darkest pit of lowest Erebus, nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out by help of dreams - can breed such fear and awe as fall upon us often when we look into our Minds, into the Mind of Man. ~ William Wordsworth

Personally, I think the "Potter" books have too many adverbs and not enough sex. ~ Lev Grossman

I wanted to show how humans can have ugly feelings that they might prefer not to acknowledge; how we're all caught up in our own problems and limited by our own life experience," she says. "To judge somebody else, to declare them substandard, to conclude that their misfortunes are due to inherent character flaws, can be a way of boosting our own self-esteem, because it must follow that our comparative success or happiness is not mere luck or chance, but the reward for superior morals or talent. ~ J.K. Rowling

He did not go after her himself, but those months after he fell out of the tree, though his physical wounds more or less healed - though he walked with a slight limp afterward - a kind of vacancy, a silence, hung around him, like a mantle on his shoulders. ~ Amanda Coplin

A face peered. All the grey night In chaos of vacancy shone; Nought but vast Sorrow was there The sweet cheat gone. ~ Walter De La Mare

His eyes held the confident vacancy that comes from the exercise of other people's power. ~ Ross Macdonald

The ship's surgeon was a spotty unshaven little man whose clothes, arrayed with smudges, drippings, and cigarette burns, were held about him by an extensive network of knotted string, The buttons down the front of those duck trousers had originally been made, with all of false economy's ingenious drear deception, of coated cardboard. After many launderings they persisted as a row of gray stumps posted along the gaping portals of his fly. Though a boutoniere sometimes appeared through some vacancy in his shirt-front, its petals, too, proved to be of paper, and he looked like the kind of man who scrapes foam from the top of a glass of beer with the spine of a dirty pocket comb, and cleans his nails at table with the tines of his salad fork, which things, indeed, he did. He diagnosed Camilla's difficulty as indigestion, and locked himself in his cabin. that was the morning. ~ William Gaddis

Myth is a tale once believed as truth; believed, it is not myth, but religion. A tale once religiously believed that has come to be called a myth is something of religion corrupted with disbelief. What are beliefs for some societies but myths for others cannot fill spiritual vacancies in the life of those others. ~ Laura Riding

A man who marries his mistress leaves a vacancy in that position. ~ Oscar Wilde

I recall how the flash of her glowing dress against my closing eyelids was like the neon glow of hotels flashing VACANCY VACANCY on a long night ride. I felt the weight of my mind hanging from a branch, pulling, pulling, and before I knew it the stem had snapped and I was falling, blind, into the void. ~ Andrew Sean Greer

He had one of those typical piece of shit days. The grind always. At least this time he had the guys to stay away from the bar and not drive home to the wife and kid drunk. He got home and immediately everything pissed him off. Sometimes the way his wife looked at him made him want to kill himself. The way she all of a sudden appeared like a total stranger. The vacancy in her eyes, it was bad. He took his son's favourite plastic mug, the one with the picture of Magic Johnson, and threw it into the trash. He felt better but not much. ~ Henry Rollins

I couldn't have thought of her more. Even vacancy was crowded with her. ~ Graham Greene

What you can do is embrace what you have right now and to allow it to fill the vacancies of what you didn't get yesterday. ~ T.D. Jakes

Reality's not strange, not unexpected.Reality doesn't reside in the hallucination of events. Reality is uneventfulness, vacancy, flatness. Reality is that nothing happens. ~ Graham Swift

The mind abhors a vacancy & is wont to people it with phantoms. ~ David Mitchell

It is well to lie fallow for a while. ~ Martin Farquhar Tupper

The present mood in which they sat relaxed was nothing more than the relief of two people coming back to a bombed building once familiar, shared as a dwelling, and finding all over the smashed foundations a rose-ash haze of willow herb. No more, no less. It is a ruin; but suspense at least, at least the need for sterile resolution, have evaporated with the fact of the return. Terror of nothingness contracts before the contemplation of it. It is not, after all, vacancy, but space; an area razed, roped off by time; by time refertilized, sown with a transfiguration, a ruin-haunting, ghost-spun No Man's crop of grace. ~ Rosamond Lehmann

True inward quietness is not that which may be produced by shutting out all outward causes of distraction
a process which, when carried out too severely, may intensify the inward ferment of the mind, especially in the young. It is rather a state of stable equilibrium; it is not vacancy, but stability
the steadfastness of a single purpose. ~ Caroline Emelia Stephen

Nothing raises the national temperature more than a VACANCY sign hanging from the colonnaded front of the Supreme Court. ~ Christopher Buckley

At the next vacancy for God, if I am elected, I shall forgive last the delicately wounded who, having been slugged no harder than anyone else, never got up again, neither to fight back, nor to finger their jaws in painful admiration. ~ John Ciardi

Why is it that when a woman is occupied by the voice in her head, or the wear of her day, or the landscape that passes through her eyes like windows on a train, the world assumes she is up for grabs? A vacant stare does not mean vacancy. It's the inverse of invitation, and yet. ~ Durga Chew-Bose

A vacancy in the heart does not accomodate itself to a stop-gap. ~ Victor Hugo

There's a vacancy, won't you come to me And fill my empty spaces I'm a motel man in a promised land That's filled with empty faces So won't you bring your sorrows bring your dreams, It's a place for you to be There's no more tomorrow or that's how it seems Won't you come to me? I've got a vacancy ~ Harry Chapin

The secret strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of Heaven is as a column, rests on thee,
And what were thou and Earth and Stars and Sea
If to the human mind's imaginings
Silence and solitude were Vacancy? ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

My wife is - in the strictest sense - my sole companion, and I need no other. There is no vacancy in my mind any more than in my heart. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

It's not really possible to open 'The Casual Vacancy' without a lot of expectations both high and low crashing around in your brain and distorting your vision. There's no point pretending they're not there. ~ Lev Grossman

The writer's way is rough and lonely, and who would choose it while there are vacancies in more gracious professions, such as, say, cleaning out ferryboats? ~ Dorothy Parker

The mind abhors a vacancy & is wont to people it with phantoms. ~ David Mitchell

Should the time come when the county family will be taken away, then the parish will feel for some time like a mouth from which a molar has been drawn - there will be a vacancy that will cause unrest and discomfort. ~ Sabine Baring-Gould

I had never before considered the possibility that I might never even want a drink yet still be left with this horrible, throbbing vacancy in the center of my being, right where my mental health and contentment were supposed to be. ~ Augusten Burroughs

Art as an aesthetic principle was supported by thousands of years of discernment and psychic rewards, but art as a commodity was held up by air. The loss of confidence that affected banks and financial instruments was not affecting cherubs, cupids and flattened popes. The objects hadn't changed: what was there before was there after. But a vacancy was created with the clamoring crowds deserted and retrenched. ~ Steve Martin

I started writing because there's an absence of things I was familiar with or that I dreamed about. One of my senses of anger is related to this vacancy - a yearning I had as a teenager ... and when I get ready to write, I think I'm trying to fill that. ~ Ntozake Shange

God is dethroned; and although the incognizant masses are tardy in realizing the event, they feel the icy draught caused by that vacancy. Man enters upon a spiritual ice age; the established churches can no longer provide more than Eskimo huts where their shivering flock huddles together. ~ Arthur Koestler

Why had this penguin come to mean so much? That, at least, is easy to explain. Anybody who suddenly moves far from family and friends and the pets they love, feels a .. vulnerable emptiness. It is inevitable; even despite the sensational compensation. Nature upholds a vacuum and it was into this space that Juan Salvador rushed. At first, he occupied it, and then he filled and dominated it. It was not big enough for him, and so he stretched it; expanded it beyond the measure. I didn't think about it, it just happened; and then, he was gone. Of course, time moves on and new family and friends and pets jostle for position in our heart, but the vacancy left by previous occupants never fills. We keep our loved ones alive throughout our memory, our conversations and our stories, but we don't necessarily choose to reveal how much they really meant. We don't have to. Anybody who lost a pet knows. ~ Tom Michell