logo

Quotes About Emptiness

I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing.
~ Guy de Maupassant
Horrible, this love to which he was now chained, a love without purpose and without aim, without joy and without triumph, a love that sickened, weakened, laid waste to everything, a love without sweetness and without intoxication, breeding nothing but regret and foreboding, tears and pain, hinting at the ecstasy of shared caresses only by some intolerable longing for kisses not to be wakened on cold lips, sterile and dry as dead leaves.
~ Guy de Maupassant
First my husband, then my parents died. After that I lost my two sisters. When death comes to someone's home it's as if it wants to get as much done as quickly as possible to save coming again for a long time.
~ Guy de Maupassant
C'était un de ces jours froids et tristes où les cÅ"urs se serrent, où les esprits s'irritent, où l'âme est sombre, où la main ne s'ouvre ni pour donner ni pour secourir.
~ Guy de Maupassant
Es evidente que la soledad resulta peligrosa para las mentes que piensan demasiado. Cuando permanecemos solos durante mucho tiempo, poblamos de fantasmas el vacío.
~ Guy de Maupassant
Olyan mélységes és olyan szomorú azoknak a szobáknak a csöndje, ahol egyedül él az ember. Nemcsak a testet, a lelket is körülfogja ez a csönd; amikor egy bútor megreccsen, szíve mélyéig megremeg az ember, mert semmi zajra nem volt elkészülve a komor lakásban.
~ Guy de Maupassant
Maybe I'm not cold. Maybe I'm just lost. Do lonely and cold feel the same? At bottom are they the same thing?
~ Guy Vanderhaeghe
And I was afraid. She frightens me because she can knock me down with a word. Because she does not know that writing is walking on a dizzying silence setting one word after the other on emptiness. Writing is miraculous and terrifying like the flight of a bird who has no wings but flings itself out and only gets wings by flying.
~ Helene Cixous
He was sunk beneath seas of silence; and his name, which would once have caught his notice above the howling of a storm, had become and empty sound.
~ H.P Lovecraft
Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity. There was nothing within hearing, and nothing in sight save a vast reach of black slime; yet the very completeness of the stillness and the homogeneity of the landscape oppressed me with a nauseating fear.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
Once in a while, though, he could not help seeing how shallow, fickle, and meaningless all human aspirations are, and how emptily our real impulses contrast with those pompous ideals we profess to hold.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
He was told how childish and limited is the notion of a tri-dimensional world, and what an infinity of directions there are besides the known directions of up-down, forward-backward, right-left. He was shown the smallness and tinsel emptiness of the little Earth gods, with their petty, human interests and connetions—their hatreds, rages, loves, and vanities; their craving for praise and sacrifice, and their demands for faith contrary to reason and Nature.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
He was shown the smallness and tinsel emptiness of the little Earth gods, with their petty, human interests and connections - their hatreds, rages, loves and vanities; their craving for praise and sacrifice, and their demands for faiths contrary to reason and nature.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
He wept only as children weep when they suffer injustice at the hands of those stronger than themselves. It is the most bitter weeping in the world. That was what happened to his [only] book; it was taken from him and burned. And he was left standing naked and without a book on the first day of summer.
~ Halldor Laxness
Le danger consiste en ce que nous devenions de véritables habitants du désert et que nous nous sentions bien chez lui.
~ Hannah Arendt
There may have been something identical about the way she fell prey to fear and to longing, namely, the act of falling prey to something, of being trapped in a craving--that fixation on a single thing, when the empty gaze forgets multiplicity or, taken over by craving and passion, considers nothing else. But that longing may also have opened up empires for her, strange, colorful empires she was at home in and could love with the living bliss that never changes.
~ Hannah Arendt
Loneliness is not solitude. Solitude requires being alone whereas loneliness shows itself most sharply in company with others.
~ Hannah Arendt
There is no place more hollow, more soulless, than a school at night. The building had been created for life, for constant motion, for students rushing back and forth, some confident, most scared, all trying to figure out their place in the world. Take that away and you might as well have a body drained of all its blood.
~ Harlan Coben
I stayed locked inside a windowless environment, sickened by the lack of sunshine like some dour owl.
~ Harlan Coben
Life had stopped for her a long time ago. She was so out of touch with her feelings that she had no joy in her life and no concept of the fact that she could be wrong. She delivered her care of her insane patients in a killing manner, but she was convinced she was right.
~ Louise Fletcher
I remember reading the book in high school and always thinking of Gatsby as this strong, stoic, suave, mysterious man who had everything under control. But when I read it as an adult, I realised he is a hollow man, a shell of a person trying to find meaning, who is not completely in touch with reality.
~ Leonardo DiCaprio
I lost my parents, which is the toughest thing to overcome.
~ Imran Tahir
To lose your last remaining parent is the toughest thing. It is a very lonely thing.
~ Arpad Busson