Quotes About Emptiness

There is a loneliness that fills the plain. Total. Lunar.

Water is something you cannot hold. Like men. I have tried, Father, brother, lover, true friends, hungry ghosts and God, one by one all took themselves out of my hands.

I lack myself.

The fact that Anna is somewhere having coffee or a dream is an assault on me. I hate these moments of poverty. What does man eat? ask the phenomenologists. Like the dogs, names, down there, starving.

The fact that Anna is somewhere having coffee or a dream is an assault on me. I hate these moments of poverty, What does man eat? ask the phenomenologists. Likes the dogs, names, down there, starving.

no interaction with another person ever brought her a bolt of pure aliveness like entering the water on a still morning with the world empty in every direction to the sky.

I stopped watching. I forgot about Nudes. I lived my life, which felt like a switched-off TV. Something had gone through me and out and I could not own it.

Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.

Silence is not an absence but a presence. Not an emptiness but repletion. A filling up.

There was something out of kilter with his mother's happiness, as though a light had been switched on by a passing stranger, and left to illuminate an empty room.

My tears brought no sense of release or relief. Their flight felt like the lightest, coldest touch of a departing lover.

Nature abhors a vacuum. And so do I.

I have a lot of faith. But I am also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. I remembered something Father Tom had told me--that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.

The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.

It was as if the empty nights were made for thinking of him. And sometimes I found myself so vividly aware of him it was as if he had only just left the room and the ring of his voice were still there. And somehow, there was a disturbing comfort in that, and, despite myself, I'd envision his face.

Anyone who has lost a love to death can tell you about that fall. You wake from a hard-won sleep and be there warm and groggy and consider engaging the day. And then you remember. Half of you is not there, and never will be again. The person who focused all the disparate parts of you into a whole is gone. The agony is too much; you almost welcome the great slide ahead of you. But there is no oblivion in it. Only blackness and an endless well of red pain.

Silence in the shell of a city, no baby crying, no car honking, no ambulance shrieking, no lovers moaning, no drunks throwing up in the alley, no lights, nothing but wind and rain and snow in its season and rust and a rattling of open doors and carcass smell. It was a possibility like a brain tumor or a scorpion bite.

You who have inhabited me in the deepest and most broken place, are going, going

God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine. God went out of my fingers. They became stone. My body became a side of mutton and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.

Now he is gone as you are gone. But he belongs to me like lost baggage.

She suffers according to the digits of my hate. I hear the filaments of alabaster. I would lie down with them and lift my madness off like a wig. I would lie outside in a room of wool and let the snow cover me. Paris white or flake white or argentine, all in the washbasin of my mouth, calling "Oh." I am empty. I am witless. Death is here. There is no other settlement.

A good mixture of nothing and everything is eating up my head alive.

Someone is dead.  Even the trees know it

To die whole, riddled with nothing but desire for it, is like breakfast after love.