Quotes About Emptiness

Now you are, but I had to pull away to make you do it. Be honest, Gideon, I came along and you realized you had a void in your life that I could fill, and you wanted to put me there and leave the rest of your life as it was.

without him for any length of time made me feel sick. I had to swallow past a painful lump to ask

He doesn't understand that when you crack something open and everything spills out, you've got nothing left but a shell.

I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

I don't care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual.

I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free.

I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.

What did my fingers do before they held him? What did my heart do, with its love? From Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices, 1962

I guess I should have reacted the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn't get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.

I felt dumb and subdued. Every time I tried to concentrate, my mind glided off, like a skater, into a large empty space, and pirouetted there, absently.

It is awful to want to go away and to want to go nowhere.

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.

I am dead to them, even though I once flowered.

And I sit here without identity: faceless. My head aches.

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free—— The peacefulness is so big it dazes you, And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets. It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet. --from Tulips, written 18 March 1961

I felt dull and flat and full of shattered visions.

I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness. I never thought, I never wrote, I never suffered. I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb. I do not know who I am, where I am going - and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions.

I wish I knew what to do with my life, what to do with my heart…I do nothing all day, boredom settles in, I look at the sky so I get to feel even smaller than I already feel and my mind keeps poisoning itself uselessly.

Sometimes I feel like I'm not solid. I'm hollow. There's nothing behind my eyes. I'm a negative of a person. All I want is blackness, blackness and silence.

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free - The peacefulness is so big it dazes you, And it asks for nothing. ~ Tulips (1961)

My hours are married to shadow.

I felt myself shrink to a small black dot against all those red and white rugs and that pine paneling. I felt like a hole in the ground.