Quotes About Emptiness

That was one of the worst things about losing your wife, I found: your wife is the very person you want to discuss it all with.

People imagine that missing a loved one works kind of like missing cigarettes. The first day is really hard but the next day is less hard and so forth, easier and easier the longer you go on. But instead it's like missing water. Every day, you notice the person's absence more.

And all at once I had no one to trade looks with.

The difference between this scene and the ones in the French paintings, Alice thought, was that the paintings all showed people interacting—picnickers and boating parties. But here everybody was separate. Even her father, a few yards away from her, was swimming now toward shore. A passerby would never guess the Garretts even knew each other. They looked so scattered, and so lonesome.

But my family's passing came so sudden. Left me strap-hanging in empty space, like.

After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you catch the grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.

That something is everywhere and always amiss is part of the very stuff of creation. It is as though each clay form had baked into it, a blue streak of nonbeing, a shaded emptiness like a bubble that not only shapes its very structure but that also causes it to list and ultimately explode. We could have planned things more mercifully, perhaps, but our plan would never get off the drawing board until we agreed to the very comprising terms that are the only ones that being offers.

I've missed you, Frank.' 'I haven't breathed since you left.

Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.

Suppose now, not to give them flour, lard. Just dead inside

Sleeping is much safer than the nightmare I'm living. When I sleep I feel nothing and I do nothing and I see nothing and nothing matters and no one cares. There's no one to hurt or disappoint or notice when I'm low and I don't need to face anyone not anyone in the world or not even myself.

I began to see, in the place of emptiness, presence. I began to see not only the visible landscape but the invisible one, a landscape in which history, unrecorded and unremembered as it is, had transmuted itself into an always present spiritual dimension.

It felt at times as if the very center of his world had become hollow, and try as he might to fill it with faith, the emptiness lingered. He was not sure why his faith was not enough, although he suspected that it was because it had come to him so late in life. If he were God, he'd look askance, too, at deathbed conversions. No matter what the priests might tell him, piety must lose some of its lustre when it was not altogether voluntary.

Love has failed us. We are essentially, irrevocably alone. Anything that seems to combat that loneliness is a trap-Love is a trap:

He had gone home from his office the previous morning to find her dead, lying on the hillside below their deck.

Yes, I am Irish and Indian, which would be the coolest blend in the world if my parents were around to teach me how to be Irish and Indian. But they're not here and haven't been for years, so I'm not really Irish or Indian. I am a blank sky, a human solar eclipse.

They're not starving to death, but they look hollow-eyed and barren, like they've been fed just enough food but never enough happiness.

I would steal horses for you, if there were any left

But mostly it feels sad, often hopeless, and hot with loneliness.

You're selfish and you're cold, and I'm tired of getting frostbite when I touch you. (Acheron)

That's exactly what I'm talking about. That's the evil that's seducing you. The malevolent power that is crawling through your blood tempting you onto a treacherous path that will cost you everything you love and hold dear. You have to let that anger go before it's too late. Vengeance always turns inward and it will consume you until nothing's left but an empty hole that nothing can fill. (Ambrose)

Even the devil may cry when he looks around hell and realizes that he's there alone.

It's been a full week since she left and all you've done is sulk like a dying cow. (Kish)