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Quotes About Emptiness

The words opened a raw, furious place in me. She wanted me to write? My daughter was dead. My writing was dead, too. One day had never come. I was the shattered pieces on the floor. Life had taken a mallet to me.
~ Sue Monk Kidd
I turned off the light and tried to sleep but ended up nursing a sense of loss that seemed heavier than ever.
~ Sue Monk Kidd
The skilled can fill their people with energy to confront the emptiness of others, while the incompetent drain their people of energy in face of the fullness of others.
~ Sun Tzu
Once you're old enough to recognize a hole in yourself it's too late for the hole to be filled.
~ Susan Choi
So perhaps it was her grief I felt as I gazed on this child not mine, and not even much of a child anymore. Grief not for him, nor for Martha exactly, but for all my lost selves, which I liked to imagine were still somehow there, waiting for my return. But those selves were long gone. I would never be younger again. This was so simple it went without saying, but unsaid, one could try to forget it.
~ Susan Choi
Why are instants of reunion so empty? Perhaps because they are so anticipated, too muffled already at the moment of their coming with every previous imagining to make any mark of their own.They refer backwards, to all the length of time that has refined itself as the prologue to cataclysm, and to all the flawed imaginings themselves, in each of which this moment is strangely dilated, expansive, arrested
~ Susan Choi
People seemed to me to fill life with shadows that should not be there.
~ Susan Cooper
I dream endlessly, my minstrel,' he said. 'I live in my dreams - they are the only thing this emptiness has not touched. Oh sometimes they are black and dreadful, nightmares from the pit. ... But most of them are wonderful, full of happiness and lost joy, and delight in making and being. Without my dreams, I should have gone mad long ago.' 'Ah,' Gwion said wryly, 'that is true of many men in this world.
~ Susan Cooper
There was no quiet, delicate crying, only body-wrenching sobs that clawed at her soul and left her with nothing but a sense of emptiness that she was afraid would never go away.
~ Susan Mallery
Everyone else not real-very distant, small figures. I would have to swim a thousand miles to reach the margin of the relationship, on the other side of which might lie other people, and it was too far, I was too tired. The almost infinitely extending network of that relationship; its dense weave That's what held me-
~ Susan Sontag
To look at something which is "empty" is still to be looking, still to be seeing something—if only the ghosts of one's own expectations.
~ Susan Sontag
Someone is always at the door, no one is ever there.
~ Susan Stewart
Her chest ached like a dull wound when she realized that her silence did not cause him a moment's reflection or curiosity. When she looked out the corner of her eye at him, she could not tell what she meant to him... Another wish that never would come true, she saw then, even if she lived forever, was that he, that someone, would look at her not as an artistic study, but with love.
~ Susan Vreeland
was gone, suddenly and irretrievably, like a zephyr shooting into the night sky, leaving a trail of moonlit particles that swirled in brief, unspeakable beauty, and then faded into nothing.
~ Susan Wiggs
When she stepped into the shop that evening, she felt an emptiness so vast that she almost couldn't breathe. Everything had drained out of her. "It's exhausting, isn't it?" asked Grandy. "A sadness like this. It's physically exhausting.
~ Susan Wiggs
There are people in this world, whose lives are nothing but a burden to them. A black veil stands between them and the world. They are utterly alone. They are like shadows in the night, shut off from joy and all gentle human emotions, unable to even give comfort to each other. Their days are full of nothing but darkness, misery and solitude.
~ Susanna Clarke
For there was nothing in his eyes but the black night and the cold stars.
~ Susanna Clarke
There was no room in his life for Marta, and none in her life for him; but it was a pity, all the same.
~ Josephine Tey
In suicide the goal is to achieve a peace of mindlessness.
~ Joshua Wolf Shenk
He must have given up on image making because his eyes had failed to see something they had yearned for; his mind had failed to capture whatever it had hoped, and that probing gaze perhaps expressed alarm at the emptying of his vision, at the dissolution of the things see, observed, into a meaningless vastness.
~ Josip Novakovich
Loneliness is about the scariest thing out there.
~ Joss Whedon
He had dreamed, he had dreamed...it left him.
~ Joy Williams
The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
He himself did not eat. I had been hungry, but sitting there now, at the table with the two of them, it felt as crude to chew or swallow as it would have to munch on popcorn at a baby's christening, or lick an ice-cream cone while your friend told you his dog died. I shouldn't be here was how I felt.
~ Joyce Maynard