Quotes About Emptiness

These were people so hungry for love that they were accepting substitutes. They were embracing material things and expecting a sort of hug back. But it never works. You can't substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for sense of comradeship. When you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feeling you're looking for. You don't get satisfaction from those things.

Unlike any man before him, Dor was being allowed to exist without getting older, to not use a single breath of the numbered breaths of his life. But inside, Dor was broken. Not aging is not the same as living, and without human contact, his soul dried up.

I collected the papers, wrapped them back in the rubber band, and felt a small grief, like a person who discovers, upon returning from a trip, that something has been left behind and there is no way now to retrieve it.

I did not grow up in poverty. But I did grow up with a poor boy's sense of longing, in my case not for what my family had never had, but for what we had had and lost.

Saeed wanted to feel for Nadia what he had always felt for Nadia, and the potential loss of this feeling left him unmoored, adrift in a world where one could go anywhere but still find nothing.

They had spent the past ten years like two trees in a forest, near one another without ever touching.

Another is the despair and emptiness they feel inside. I'm okay, they tell you. I'm fine.

You'll freeze out here," he said. What did he know? I was already a sheet of ice, a frozen branch, a twig. I could freeze in my own house, if I wanted to. The man's eyes darted down the road. I was an icy slip of nothing. I was invincible.

He said, "Only you." I was alone and he was alone and we had nothing in common short of being human at night.

Biz her ÅŸeyde birbirimizin yar?s? idik: Åžimdi ben onun pay?n? çalar gibi oluyorum. Her iÅŸte onun yar?s?, ikinci yar?s? olmaya o kadar al??m??t?m ki, ÅŸimdi art?k yar?m bir varl?k gibiyim. Ne yapsam, ne düÅŸünsem onun eksikliÄŸini duyuyorum.

Oh she says the inconceivable sorrow of it, those chairs piled up at night when you're sitting in a cafè. The last one left.

A desert is a place without expectation.

I missed home like the ache of hunger, something in me left empty. I'd missed it every day since we crossed out of the valley, going over the mountains. Roots—yes. There were roots in my heart, as deep as any corruption could go.

There was no eager ache of hunger in my belly from the long day of cooking and cleaning without a pause; there was no joyful noise of too many people crammed in around the table, laughing and reaching for the platters. Looking down at my tiny feast only made me feel more desperately lonely.

Maybe when your mother died young, you became instantly old.

Enough small empty boxes thrown into a big empty box fill it full.

Upon learning to see a man becomes everything by becoming nothing. He

Everything is filled to the brim," he repeated, "and everything is equal. I'm not like your friend who just grew old. When I tell you that nothing matters I don't mean it the way he does. For him, his struggle was not worth his while, because he was defeated; for me there is no victory, or defeat, or emptiness. Everything is filled to the brim and everything is equal and my struggle was worth my while.

Apuré el último sorbo de café y ña contemplé en silencio unos instante. Pensé en lo mucho que deseaba refugiarme en aquella mirada huidiza que se temía transparente, vacía. Pensé en la soledad que iba a asaltarme aquella noche cuando me despidiece de ella, sin más trucos ni historias con que engañar su compañía. Pensé en lo poco que tenía que ofrecerle y en lo mucho que quería recibir de ella.

Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don't stop at your station.

El tiempo pasa más aprisa cuanto más vacío está. Las vidas sin significado pasan de largo como trenes que no paran en su estación.

Six years later my mother's absence remained in the air around us, a deafening silence that I had not learned to stifle with words.

I looked at the group of human remains that languished in the corner and smiled at them. It occurred to me that their very presence was testimony to the moral emptiness of the universe and the mechanical brutality with which it destroys the parts it no longer needs.

I wandered off, walking through streets that seemed emptier than ever, thinking that if i didn't stop, if I kept on walking, i wouldn't notice that the world I knew was no longer there.