Quotes About Emptiness

ONE of the paradoxes of the mystical life is this: that a man cannot enter into the deepest center of himself and pass through that center into God, unless he is able to pass entirely out of himself and empty himself and give himself to other people in the purity of a selfless love.

The thing that crushed me was that I had never learned to dance.

Hence the sacred attitude is one which does not recoil from our own inner emptiness, but rather penetrates into it with awe and reverence, and with the awareness of mystery.

What a strange thing! In filling myself I had emptied myself

The contemplative way is, in fact, not a way. Christ alone is the way, and he is invisible. The 'desert' of contemplation is simply a metaphor to explain the state of emptiness which we experience when we have left all ways, forgotten ourselves and taken the invisible Christ as our way.

All those days and nights were without romance, horrible.

I feel like one Who treads alone Some banquet-hall deserted, Whose lights are fled, Whose garland's dead, And all but he departed!

Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.

That night she sat for hours, too numb to even drink, teaching herself to breathe in a vaccum. For this, oh God, was the void.

Death glided by, shadowless, among the empties on the grass.

And over my head," relates Squire Haligast, "it form'd an E-clipse, an emptiness in the Sky, with a Cloud-shap'd Line drawn all about it, wherein words might appear, and it read,— 'No King . . .

The toothaches got worse, she dreamed of disembodied voices from whose malignance there was no appeal, the soft dusk of mirrors out of which something was about to walk, and empty rooms that waited for her. Your gynecologist has no test for what she was pregnant with.

Something, something like the silvering of a mirror, remained between them. If Dally wanted to throw herself into those arms in their carefully kept sleeves, she would not be pushed away, she was at least that sure, but past that, where all that ought to matter lay, she saw only a black-velvet absence of signs.

How beautiful she loked, but there was nobody to see, nobody.

My heart is heavy, she thought. It's not just a saying. It is what is—heavy, a great stone lodged in my breast, pressing down my whole being. How can I even stand straight and look out upon the world? I am doubled over into myself and, for all the weight, find only emptiness.

Then what is the opposite of love?" Because whatever that is, that's what I feel for Daneska. "Indifference.

This time, there are no tears. This time, there is only emptiness and I feel it set in the straight line of my mouth. I am not strong enough for this. I want an earthquake, a hurricane, anything - even a devil, the one with the cloven hoof - Mrs. Leed's unfortunate 13th child - to rush out and stomp on me, break me into little pieces and hurl me to the stars, let me go back with those people I love. Please.

But we want a record of us where there is 'nothing' as if by holding each other's waists, we could find the border and lose it.

The city no longer appeals to me for the cultural experiences and possessions I might acquire there, but because its population is less homogeneous than Plains society. Its holiness is to be found in being open to humanity in all its diversity. And the western Plains now seem bountiful in their emptiness, offering solitude and room to grow

It's hard to miss something that you have never had.

I wasn't glad that I hadn't died. And I wasn't sad that I hadn't. I wasn't anything.

Of course if a person looked at his life from above, he could see the whole thing for what it was; he'd only feel lost while he was living it, when he still hadn't figured out that it was in fact a maze and that both the way in and the way out led to the same enormous empty place surrounding it. (From The Thin Place)

Pain is the world. I don't have anywhere to run.

Murder is a dream because lack is the center of both.